Author: AQR Piece by Piece

Quilt Market gives shop owners the opportunity to learn from a variety of instructors. The line-up of classes might give you ideas for new techniques to teach in the store or ways to create displays or longterm planning for your store. AQR wants to help you expand your knowledge. We’ll be presenting three Schoolhouse events, as well as, several of our contributors will be teaching classes. I recently asked Georganne Bender of Kizer and Bender to share with me what classes they are teaching and what you can expect. Here’s her response:

We are doing three programs at Quilt Market this fall; and all three are designed to help retailers thrill their customers, drive their competition crazy, and put more money in their pockets!

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR RETAILERS is a must for every attendee at Quilt Market. Keeping up with the changes to social medias is almost a full time job! We don’t just talk about what’s important in social networking, we show you how to do it, along with strategies to help you build a strong fan following. We’ll cover Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. Attendees will leave this seminar armed with practical, real-world social media techniques they can use right away.

In DIGITAL IN DIAPERS: TARGETING THE MILLENNIALS & GENERATION Z we’ll share strategies to help you understand these two “new” generations, their personalities, the events that shaped them, things that motivate them, and most importantly, what’s required to connect with them in person and online. Millennials and Zeds are so different than Baby Boomers and Generations Z – they will require us to learn to do business on their terms. It’s important information every retailer needs to know.

One of the things many retailers neglect is the “lake front property”, the important selling areas of their sales floor. We’re not just retail strategists, we’re professional store planners. Our presentation, WHAT REALLY HAPPENS ON YOUR SALES FLOOR: HOW TO OPTIMIZE THE SHOPPER’S JOURNEY is the next best thing to bringing us to your store. We take you from the parking lot to the back door and every space in between. We’ll share how to set your sales floor to sell – and what retailer doesn’t want their product to sell itself?

Thanks for that information Georganne. We hope everyone visits Quilts Inc and signs up for both Schoolhouse and other classes today!

It’s a winner. Yes PC=QP. What does that mean, you ask? Precuts=Quick-Piecing. And, we know our customers like quick piecing to generate happiness!

Recently we’ve seen a trend to offer smaller groups of precuts. Benefits to the shop owner are lower retail price to grab customer’s attention. Benefits to the customer is less waste. Check out the Hoffman Bali Poppies 2-1/2” batik precuts are designed to let quilters “make it their own.” Each Poppy consists of 20 different, laser-cut strips of Hoffman Bali Batiks arranged in a color wash for use by itself in a project or coordinate with any in the 12-pack collection.

Quilters can mix and match Poppies to their heart’s content to set the light, medium and dark values of their projects, infuse direction and texture, and create dynamic color combinations.

Looking for ways to use precuts in your store? Check out these pattern options:

• Hoffman Spring Project Book
• All Rolled Up by Pieced Tree Patterns
• The Teacher’s Pet line-up of precut patterns
• Strip Savy by Kate Henderson

Respond to our blog with patterns you like when using precuts in your shop…or how your shop uses precuts. We’d love to hear more!

For a long time, wool, one of nature’s oldest fibers, was neglected by quilters. We were all “100% cotton or bust!” True you saw the occasional vintage wool quilt but it was likely a crazy quilt and hadn’t been quilted but rather tied. And old wool quilts were heavy! Even if they were colorful or interesting, hanging them for exhibition was a challenge. But some collectors adored wool, especially after being exposed to work like traditional Welsh quilts. See photos from The Welsh Quilt Centre to understand why Welsh wool quilts started to inspire quilters worldwide.

American quilters in particular were resistant to using wool. We thought wool’s tendency to shrink was a drawback and we assumed wool anything had to be dry-cleaned. But somewhere about fifteen years ago, the tide turned. Sue Spargo, a quilter/folk artist from Ohio but originally a South African, had no built-in prejudice about the fiber. Rather she welcomed the intense colors achievable in wool fabrics and used vivid shades like lime green and hot pink in her work. She explored embellishing wool and expanded the traditional embroidery lexicon with new variations of the bullion stitch. Now a respected teacher and author, Spargo’s multi-layer wool stitched work is recognizable worldwide.

In a parallel trend, primitive stitchery fans who had formerly been using wool threads in cross stitch and crewel–but not much wool yardage–discovered wool plaids and plains in dark homey colors like rust and deep green and took the fiber to heart. What ‘prim stitchers’ taught us was that wool didn’t have to be turned under neatly like traditional appliqué but rather its roughness and tactile charm could be used to advantage. While primitive-style projects turned up occasionally in quilt publications, the arrival of the primitive style in the quilt world as a huge influence began in 2010 and the following year, a magazine devoted to the style called Primitive Quilts & Projects hit the newsstands.

Last year another publication titled Punch Needle & Primitive Stitcher became available.

What is appealing about wool now is that it is available to quilt shops in smaller cuts. No longer do shops have to order enormous fat bolts of wool and hope it sells! Everyone can dabble in wool. When doing wool appliqué, the background fabrics don’t have to be wool as well. We’ve broken the fiber barrier! Quiltmakers are using flannels and even flat-texture cottons for their wool appliqué backgrounds.

Recently at the International Quilt Market I noticed in addition to wool fabrics, kits, and wool-inspired books, that batting companies have taken up the wool banner. Hobbs offers two different weights and textures of wool batting. Hand quilters in particular have taken the Tuscany batt to heart. A revived Mountain Mist batting company spearheaded by Linda Pumphrey who literally ‘wrote the book’ on Mountain Mist quilt patterns, is just now offering a very soft and springy wool batt that’s 20% polyester and 80% wool. And watch the AirLite Batting Company, which is poised to enter the wool batting market with a new batt this Fall. If your customers are already working with wool in the folk-art Spargo-style, I saw new sizes of bullion needles at the Colonial Needle Company that they will appreciate. If you love wool, 2016 is going to be a very good year!

–Pepper Cory

Recently I attended and taught at a large quilting event in the Midwest. I realized while perusing the vendor mall that many vendors showcased practically the same fabrics! There were the usual pre-cut assortments from large fabric companies, duplicating book titles, and even look-alike sample quilts in several booths. I couldn’t help but think that vendors missed the chance to move their older fabrics by not offering pre-cuts they’d made up themselves. I talked to one shop owner who said it was easier to order current pre-cuts than to deal with slicing up old bolts. But, I opined, the old bolts will still be there when you get home…and that’s money already spent! Isn’t it time to get the older fabrics out the door? Time to take them on the road!

Then I remembered something Kizer and Bender had mentioned in their article in the last issue of American Quilt Retailer magazine. (pages 22-26, February 2016, issue #127). The business gurus suggested displaying lines of fabric in color progressions or rainbow-style.

There’s something universally appealing about a rainbow-style display of fabrics. It’s orderly and yet inspires creativity as shoppers run their fingers along the top of the bolts until they reach “their” color. The display invites them to choose and, like kids in a candy store always picking the same sweet, they will haul a bolt to the cutting table for yet another slice of their favorite shade. Why not apply the Rainbow principle to a bundle of pre-cuts?

Most strip bundles (jellyroll) are 2 1/2” wide strips and number from 40-42 strips per bundle. How about offering eight colors (six in the Rainbow progression plus black and white) starting with a solid strip of each color?  The progression is red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple—that’s six—plus some blacks and whites at the “end of the rainbow.” Roll the strips with the black and whites in the middle and then the progression of colors, ending with red. Package the strip bundle with a paper collar printed with your store name and contact info. The Rainbow bundle just became a marketing tool. Rainbows are popular throughout Spring and Summer. Rather than asking the customer to choose from all eight color groups, you’re offering a selection that would have taken most people hours to pick!

The Rainbow idea might be the beginning of an in-store competition. Who can make a quilt with the Rainbow bundle? First person to make something and post a picture of their creation on the store’s Facebook page gets a prize…

–Pepper Cory

American Quilt Retailer is pleased to welcome Pepper Cory as our AQR blogger. Her vast knowledge of the industry and her business approach will be a great addition to our team. Our goal is to provide another opportunity for quilt shop owners and industry professionals to communicate with each other. We’ll be working to make this blog a useful resource for you. Read on for Pepper’s first blog post.

First Dip in the Blog Sea

When the opportunity to write the blog Piece by Piece for American Quilt Retailer presented itself, I was intrigued. Sure I’d written blogs before but they were purely for personal interest. In my occasional posts on the blog Quilt Flap I chat about unusual antique quilts. When there was enough interest out there that I would be challenged to take more photos and in a month or three, write again. I wrote about teaching and my own quilting efforts-with an interesting family story thrown in here and there-in another blog called Pepper at the Quilt Studio. I viewed both my blogs as sporadic commentary on what interested me. If anyone who read the blogs cared to leave a comment that was cool.

But writing a blog for a business is a different breed of cat. One might even pose the question, “Why should a business write a blog?” When I delved into the subject, I realized there are numerous benefits to writing a business blog. I hope that in the future you as blog readers and shop owners will be able to relate to what I write, comment and communicate with AQR, and find in Piece by Piece some useful and thought-provoking snippets of information.

‘Snippets’ might seem an odd word to describe the content of this blog but that nicely sums up the first rule of blog writing: keep it simple, interesting, and to the point. Blogs deliver straight-to-the-reader information while at the same time a reader can use the blog as a channel of information back up the pipeline to the publisher by leaving a comment.

As a blog writer, you can learn about your viewers by checking your blog’s analytics. What’s that? Analytics are the statistics about your blog. They tell you how many people view your blog and which operating system your readers use (such as Windows vs Apple vs mobile phones). You’ll learn which topic lit a fire so that you can write better and more interesting content. And if you know how your viewers access you, you can design a smoother delivery, as in a simpler blog design that a phone user will appreciate.

And face it: search engines (such as Google) love blogs! Topics in your business blog, links to other websites, the photos on your business blog—all go out into the sea of information on the internet and get quoted and re-quoted and then linked back to both your blog and business website. But the thing I love best about blogging is that it gives your business a personal voice.

This blog Piece by Piece will come out every two weeks. We will bring you timely industry news and give you the “back story” on topics you first read about in articles in American Quilt Retailer magazine. We’ll pose some questions about our industry and give you a heads-up when our whiskers tingle and we sense a trend building. But most of all, we want to hear from you. Consider this your personal invitation to write to American Quilt Retailer and tell us the topics that interest and concern you.

American Quilt Retailer February 2016 issue