Finding Our Way

It's been a wild winter, this 2020, hasn't it?  I honestly forgot I even had this blog in the midst of our usual busy travel schedule that turned to a broken down van that caused a week long delay just before we flew to Seattle when the virus broke out and we rushed home to try to squeeze in one more show in Atlanta which shut down half way through.

Wow!  Was that hard to read without punctuation?  That's how life felt February through April.   Even as our expected income producing activities came to a screeching halt, our website has become very busy.  We are very grateful for this new way of doing business and are scrambling to update pictures and descriptions.  We temporarily moved our shipping department to our house and organized ourselves to ship out orders at least once per day, and sometimes twice.  We're now ready to move back to our warehouse as Florida never did go on full lockdown and our warehouse is very private anyways and we'd like to eat at the table again.

We're beginning to settle into what will be our "new normal" for at least the next several months, if not longer, as it will take a very long time to get the quilt shows up and functioning again.  In the meantime we are pleased to be learning how to do virtual shows and loving the one on one conversations it gives us with our customers.

I had a good learning experience recently that I'd like to share.  A very long time ago, maybe 8 or 9 years, I won a contest on Facebook and the Fairfield World Company sent me 18 rolls of OlyFun, an outdoor type of fabric.  I immediately knew I wanted to make an outdoor quilt with it but somehow it didn't get done.  I almost gave it away when we packed up to move cross country, but decided it was so light weight that it could make the move.  This past weekend, after weeks of only doing "business" sewing, I decided to make something just for the fun of it.  We had clipped a piece of shade cloth to our patio umbrella 3 years ago and it still hung there like a rag.  I designed a simple and colorful new shade and made it out of OlyFun and FUN it is!  It's pictured below and I plan to make 2 more sections.

This was a very relaxing and fulfilling exercise and motivated me to start thinking of new and fun directions that our company might go in.  This led to interesting conversations with our team and we're all pretty excited about the future.  We realize that we don't have to invent all new ideas, we have plenty of good ones that we "stashed" in the past and are now ready to come out and play, just like my OlyFun did.

Keep an eye on us for a fun and exciting future!