Where to Sell Your Quilts
Once you have created a couple or 10 quilts you might want to consider selling them. You can give them away to friends and family members and you can even sell them for FUN AND PROFIT. After all, you will need to recoup all that money and time you spent creating your fabulous creations and what better way than to sell a few. Of course, the more inventory you can create before you decide to sell the better. And the more the make the faster you will get at making them. There are various avenues for selling your quilts and Spring and Fall are probably the better times to try and sell them. You can pay the fees for a booth at a local quilting show or even pay the smaller fees at your local Flea and Farmers Market. But if you don’t want to schlep all your inventory to any of these places you can create a website.
If you go the traditional route you will have to pay for a domain, pay for website hosting fees and setup a shopping cart. And absolutely set up a PAYPAL account. PAYPAL is a secure credit card/electronic check processing website that keeps yours and your customers information safe and secure. Check out the GODADDY website for an inexpensive website solution that will give you complete control of how you website looks like, feels like and interacts. If you are not internet or web savvy then you can even try two websites that we use in conjunction with our own Jolene’s Books and More by going to Yardsellr and or ETSY.
Yardsellr is a FREE Listing website that you can upload pictures of your items, write a description, and have all your friends on Facebook, Twitter and Pinrest to view your listings and share them with their friends and family. There are no fees to the sellers but a small fee is added to each buyer. It is highly recommended that you have your PAYPAL account already set up before joining so you can get PAID. They also require that you get a tracking number after shipping. They have a Help section for you to read through to find out all the rules and how to’s on setting up your account and other things that you need to know. You will have to relist each item every 30 days but they don’t charge for that either.
Now, ETSY is another seller/buyer website that gives you a little more leeway in your shop. They do charge $0.20 per item that you list and a small percentage of the amount you sell. They help you get the word out and offer videos and instructions on how to list, take pictures, involve your friends, even pay a small fee to have your items featured quickly. You have to renew your items every 4 months and pay the $0.20 per item fee again. The fees are due by the 15th of the following month. That gives you a little time to list your items and hopefully make a sale or two before they are due. Read through the help sections of any site or service you decide to use. So far we have been happy with all the services we are recommending.
Review of Quilting Websites
As beginners we are searching for fast and free information on how to quilt, patterns in quilting and anything else we can use to help us in our new hobby. There are websites about beginning quilting, quilting museums, quilting guilds, quilting magazines, shops that specializes in quilts and selling quilting materials, and quilt festivals.
http://www.quilting-beginner.com/ Quilting Beginner
http://www.quiltingassistant.com/ Quilting Assistant
http://www.pamsquiltedmemories.com/index.htm Pam’s Quilted Memories
http://www.keepsakequilting.com/default.aspx Keepsake Quilting
http://www.quilterswarehouse.com/ Quilters Warehouse
http://www.quilterswarehouse.com/ McCalls Quilting
http://www.thequiltermag.com/ The Quilter Mag
http://www.quiltpatternmagazine.com/ Quilt Pattern Magazine
http://www.quiltershomemag.com/index.html Quilters Home Magazine
http://www.quiltersnewsletter.com/index.html Quilters Newsletter
http://www.quiltingboard.com/ Quilting Board and Forum
http://www.quiltfestjax.com/ Quilt Festival in Jacksonville, Florida
http://www.quiltuniversity.com/ take Classes on Quilting
http://www.electricquilt.com/ Electric Quilt
http://www.equilter.com/ eQuilter
http://mqumag.com/ Machine Quilting
We hope you will find some of these websites helpful in your quest for learning how to quilt.
Quilting Materials
If you have ever thought about what your ideal quilt would look like and feel like then this is a good post for you. You have researched the various patterns by viewing the previous post, you have been looking at material at the fabric shops and you are just about ready to start putting together your very first quilt or even your 100th. Reviewing your choices in materials is always a pleasant way to spend a few hours or a couple of minutes a few times a week. Planning out a quilt can be fun. Look around your house, look through your closets and see if you can find some old material, some clothes that are no longer being used, some used sheets or old blankets that you can recycle into a quilt. You can pick out your most favorite types of cloth or sets of colors you would like to use. You can decide on the scheme or pattern later.
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Example of Quilts Around the World
Quilting is and has in the past been considered an artistic endeavor. There has been quilting throughout history. It can be a great pastime, a way to make money or something that you can pass down to your children and grandchildren. Quilting should be fun and an expression of your own creative process. Quilts can be just interesting designs, tell a story or memorialize an event. Most of all you and anyone you involve in your quilting project should enjoy the process. Below you will find links to various quilting museums where you can view examples of quilts to get you started. We have copied some of them for you to preview in our slideshow:
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History of Quilting
The history of quilting goes back to ancient Egypt. One of the earliest existing decorative works is the “Tristan quilt”, made around 1360. Made in Sicily, and as one of the earliest surviving quilts in the world, at least two sections survive at the V&A Museum and in Bargello, Florence. Russia holds the oldest example in existence. It is a quilted linen carpet found in a Mongolian cave, and now kept at the Saint Petersburg department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Archaeology Section. During the civil war both the north and the south’s families were making quilts to fit on small cots to keep their respective soldiers warm. Again, during the Great Depression, families were making quilts out of used clothing to keep warm. Quilts are just three layers of cloth with the top piece a decorative design. Most were handed down by family members and are considered heirlooms. During the last several hundreds of years quilts were mostly made for the rich with expensive cloth in elaborate designs or even pictures of scenes from history. Like the cave paintings of old most of these quilts tell our history and should be preserved. This is a time-honored craft that everyone can and should do at least once.
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Free Motion Quilting
You can find a variety of free resources on the web about quilting including a beginners course on Free Motion Quilting. I was cruising through youtube.com the other day and came across this series of videos on Free Motion Quilting for the Beginner. It is a great video series that explains how to do free motion quilts using a regular sewing machine. Take a look and see what you think:
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Quilting for Profit
Once you have created some quilts you may want to starting selling them. There are a variety of different ways to do this including going to arts and craft festivals in your city, flea markets on even setting up your website. You will need to have a good stock built up and that will take some time. You can look on the internet for the local arts and crafts festival, their cost, times and locations. The local flea market is a good place to set up a booth but then again you will need to contact the local vendors to find out their costs for a booth, times they are open and any special requirements they may have for bringing in your own tables and such. You want to have a way to display your quilts such as a rack as well as some bags to put them in, and change for cash payers. And you will probably need a way to take credit cards as well. I found a great website that talks about this subject at: http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/how-accept-credit-cards-garage-sale-1273.php
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Quilting as a Hobby
Quilting can be a great hobby to start. I found a 4 part series of Beginning Quilting Videos on You-tube that I thought you might like:
Part One
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Quilting Websites
We stating in the post previously that we will be finding FREE information resources for those who would like to learn about quilting. The first one I found that seems to offer a free beginners course in short little lessons that will give you a starting point: http://www.sewaquilt.com/
I read through the material and it has some great beginners information. The free lesson does seem to stress the fabric choices mostly. But does have other links for more information as well.
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Quilting for Beginners
There are lots of information all over the internet for those who would like to learn how to quilt. We have even gathered hundreds of different books, videos, magazines and quilting supplies. Not only can you get quilting blocks of material, sewing machine stuff, thread, and much, much more. Check out our bookstore at: http://allaboutquiltingonline.info/wordpress/bookstore
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