Taking Shape

My “Small Change Quilts” and my 2020 are starting to take shape. It’s both exciting and a relief when quilts and futures start to unfold, don’t you think? Sometimes both of them are understood from the get go. The vision and the path towards it are clear, and all you have to do it step into it and enjoy the certainty of the journey. I like making quilts like that. I rarely make a plan like that. My plans are usually like the quilts that just start with a feeling. A colour, maybe, or a shape, or a group of pretty fabrics. When you make this quilt, you have to move slowly, tune in, let it sit for a while, hang your progress up somewhere where you can walk past and analyse it quietly. If you dive in too fast, or assume you know too quickly, it runs away, shy and elusive.

I’ve always been pretty terrible at knowing what I want. It’s always been my first instinct to ask what other people want, or need, what would be useful, or good to do. I find it much more natural to ask “what should I do?” Answers always rush in in abundance in reply to that question. But when I ask, “what do I want to do?”? Crickets.

Occasionally, over the past year, I’ve had this idea that I would like to shrink the shop down and stop cutting to order. But I couldn’t figure out why. Did I just want to shake things up a bit? have a break? have more control over my time? tidy up? I’m always a little suspicious of self-sabotage. Did I want the whole thing to just STOP, but I’m too afraid to say? The idea of stocking our most popular items and cutting in small batches kept popping up, but because I really understood why we cut to order (no waste, no time spent cutting things that don’t sell, having a large variety of products, even if they don’t sell often), I just kept winning all the arguments against it.

Last year, on our last day of work before the holidays, the laser cutter broke down with 3 orders to go. Now, laser cutters really don’t like hot weather, and we’ve been working in an old brick shed, so I can’t wait to have our baby (/dragon - it depends on the day as to how I name it!) in our new, insulated home, protected from the weather. The whole thing turned out to be an easy fix for Tim, but I still hated having to go back in just before Christmas to cut orders when I was wanting to be chilling at home with my new jigsaw puzzle!

Once we returned after Christmas with 3 weeks of orders waiting, the same thing happened again! Only this time, Tim needed to order a part in and wait for the weekend to fix it. I find times like this incredibly stressful. I hate letting people down, being so uncertain of how it’s going to pan out, being at the mercy of the laser cutter, or the weather, or school holidays, or poor health. I know everyone is at the mercy of things like this, out of their control. But I needed a system that took these things into consideration, rather than steeling myself and hoping for the best. I realised in one of those instant, lightbulb, lightning strike flashes, that this is the problem my year long nudging would solve. Isn’t that strange? I knew there were things in my work (and life) that made me feel like everything was out of my control, and I didn’t know how to put them in order. And I had an inkling of something I really wanted but couldn’t figure out why. And for a whole year, I couldn’t put them together. I have never been so grateful for a machine break down!

So, in order to create more of a buffer between life’s surprises, and getting orders out quickly and easily, I’ve decided to start cutting products in small batches and listing what’s in stock in the shop. In 3 weeks, when Lucy finishes up, I’ll take down from the shop everything except PDF patterns. We’ll pack up the workspace and move into our new home about a week later, and settle in. I’m hoping that after a week or 2, the new studio will be ready to go, and we can start cutting through our ‘most popular’ list and putting things back in the shop.

Cutting to order has been great for us for the past 4 years. It’s helped us learn what sells most without wasting time or paper on things that just sit on the shelf. But now that we’ve been selling for a while, we have some pretty great analytics to help me plan my future inventory. Here’s a fun fact! Our top 50 items made up 87% of our sales last year! The remaining 300 (!) made up the last 13%. It’s numbers like this that have helped me have the courage to take the final plunge into our new structure.

That means there’s a little less than 3 more weeks to order whatever you like! I’m really hoping my Small Change Quilts pattern will be ready next week, offering something new and easy to make without needing a special EPP kit. Perfect for when life is full of surprises (or dragons)!

Edit: Due to the amazing response to Pink Door Fabric’s Cherish 2020 BOM, I’ll be releasing the Small Change Quilts pattern next month after the move. Thanks!