Recently I had an issue with a customer (2 actually). It was my fault as I didn’t let them know
that their custom quilts could take months to get them done. I woefully under quoted them on the time it takes to do a custom quilt and apparently I lead them to believe that these
would be quick and easy… My
mistake! Custom quilts take much longer
than a usual Edge to Edge (E2E) for several reasons.
The first reason they take longer is because first of all
you have to ditch (stitch in the ditch) around every section of the quilt… This
can take many days as if you hand guide this portion, you have to be in “good
shape” mentally and physically – no aches and pains, no issues gnawing on your
mind as you can’t do this with any malady.
If you choose to do it with the computer, it actually takes even longer
as you have to not only stitch it out (which goes slower than hand guiding),
but you have to set each line up on the computer. Both of these take many hours and sometimes
days.
The second reason they take longer is that you have many
more patterns to pick out. If the
customer can tell you exactly what they want, it cuts out the design time…this
seldom happens. If you are like me, I
need to have complete confidence in my choices and until I do…I keep
looking. The design time can take hours
if not days as well.
The third reason they take longer is the time it takes to
set up these sections on the computer. I
won’t bore you with the details on how you do this, but it requires much
measuring and marking the quilt and sizing the quilting pattern, then you have
to stitch them out and if it is a complex quilting pattern the stitching out
takes quite a bit of time as well. This
process almost always takes days.
When you count this up, it takes hours if not days for all
of these processes, so most custom quilts take at least 3 – 5 days and can take
as long as 7 – 14 days (and some even longer).
As professional longarm quilters, I think we have a habit of making this
seem easier and faster than it actually is, because once we see how we would do
it…we let the customer know that it can be done and forget to convey the
complexity of the process.
Another reason it is hard to estimate how much time it takes
to do a custom quilt, for professional longarm quilters, is that it is
impossible to know exactly how long it will take and when you will be able to
fit it in to your other workload. It
might seem to a customer that their custom quilt is getting pushed to the back
of the line and is not a priority, when they see E2E get done and go out the
door. This is not the case, all quilts
are important to me, it is just that sometimes you need to be a little more
inspired for a custom quilt. You need to
have your mind and body right to tackle it and sometimes that takes longer than
other times.
Ok, so now you know why it takes so much longer than E2E,
this should also help explain why they cost so much. A few years ago I did a custom quilt for
about $400…it was on my frame for 2 weeks and I worked on it every day for at
least 5 hours a day and sometimes 8 hours a day…so counted up I worked on this
quilt for approx. 91 hours…This means I worked on this quilt for approx.. $4.39
an hour. Hopefully this helps to explain
the behind the scenes of a custom quilt and why it takes longer and costs more
than an E2E.
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