Over the years, people have inquired about whether I sell my finished quilts. As a policy, I don’t. I choose to gift them to friends and family instead, because it seems like the safer bet. I’d much rather pass my projects on to recipients I know and who are more likely to enjoy them and appreciate my work.
For years, then, the life cycle of my quilts was simple: I would make whatever brought me joy and then decided on a home for a project. This was a fine approach, but in retrospect, there were times when a gifted quilt seemed to fall flat. Maybe the design or palette wasn’t to the recipient’s liking? (That’s understandable, especially with my, at times, limited knowledge of the person’s taste.) Maybe she just wasn’t into having a handmade quilt in her decor? (No judgment! Such people do exist!)
So I’ve honed my approach. Now I like to accumulate several finished quilts and then ask the recipient to pick her favorite.
It works! Perhaps the person doesn’t get the sense that this quilt was specifically crafted for her in mind, but she leaves with a useful piece of art that, for whatever reason, speaks to her.
And that’s the process I followed recently to gift eight finished throw-size quilts to teachers who worked with my younger son through middle school.
I have a friend who follows a similar process with family. She lays out her quilts at a family reunion, and everyone can pick a favorite or two. I conducted my process over email, contacting a few recipients with pictures of my finishes and asking them to pick a quilt before weeding out pictures of the claimed quilts and reaching out to the next small group.
It feels good to gift a quilt, and it feels even better knowing that I’ve increased the likelihood that the quilt will be used and loved by giving the recipient a say in the process.
Pictured here is one of the quilts I passed on to its forever home in the latest round of gifting. The design is Step Dance, from Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts, and it’s a prototype I made years ago, well before I had even decided to write the book.
This project is so old that I have to plumb the depths of my memory (and email folders!) to dig up the details. The fabric is Ava Kate by Carina Gardner for Riley Blake, and Narda Junda of Maz Q’s Sewing and Quilting Studio quilted it for me in a fabulous swirly pantograph.
(You can see the version I sewed for the book, in a collection by Sweetwater, here.)
The black in this line caught my attention—I love a fabric collection with some unexpected black in it! The striped print was an especially effective addition to the quilt design, because it accentuates the idea of ascending stairs and helped me settle on a name for the pattern.
I was working with a fat quarter bundle for this project and used as much of it as I could, even piecing the leftover blue bits together to make a scrappy binding.
What do you do with your finished projects? Do you, too, pass them on to family and friends? Do you enjoy the thrill of selling them online or at craft fairs? Or do you fold them up and put them in a closet, a dilemma to solve another day?
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