A BIG, new chapter!
For several months now, we've been planning a big new adventure. It feels surreal and wonderful for it to finally be the right time to share it with you! Born out of the loneliness of Covid lockdowns, the longing to see beautiful places again, the realisation that old friendships are precious (and life is short), and we wanted to be near them again, and maybe a little of that 5 year itch that I get when I've been in one place for a while, Tim and I have decided to sell up our home, pack our family into a caravan, and travel down the East Coast of Australia later this year. Once we've taken our big, amazing vacation, we're going to resettle in Orange, NSW.
We started with a "wouldn't it be amazing if the business would allow us to travel" conversation, and ended up with a "what would we want our life to look like when we got back?" chat. In the end, we made the very difficult, but exciting decision to sell our laser cutter to friends in Melbourne who will continue to cut our best sellers for us! We're really excited for this change that will enable Tim to go back to full time tech work, me to focus on my favourite parts of the business, and our kids will finally go back to school.
And so! My first job is to cut a bunch of our best sellers so that we'll have ample stock during the handover. In order to do this efficiently, I've decided to reduce our catalogue to those few favourites, and just focus on them. This means that MOST of our products will be leaving the shop ON MONDAY and we will stop cutting to order. Instead, we will cut batches of your favourite kits, and have them in stock.
Oh, my, this has been a hard decision to make! I wrestled for a long time before I finally had the guts to say what I really wanted to Tim. I have LOVED being a great supplier of all kinds of shapes over the last 6 years. I hate the idea that people might thing we gave up, or folded because it wasn’t financially viable, or that they might be disappointed because they can’t find what they want in our shop, or that we’ve worked so hard to make a beautiful, earth-friendly craft product, and now many of our shapes won’t be available. But if I follow the numbers (the information that my accounting software gives me about the products that actually pay the bills), and follow my own longings for how I want to shape my second 40 years, I know this is right for us. Really, in the whole of human history, only a small, fortunate few get to ask, “what do you want?” and then get to chase after it. I need to grab hold of that privilege with everything I’ve got. And hopefully as a result, I have more joy and love and strength and colour to offer myself, my family, and the world around me.
After Monday, we will be keeping in stock:
- Sunshiny Day
- Ice-Cream Soda
- Cherish in both sizes
- Smitten by Lulu Well
- Eden
and also coming soon, in new bulk boxes:
- 1" and 2" hexagons
- 2" 6pt diamonds
- 1 1/2" jewels
We will also continue to sell ALL of our PDF patterns.
So have a browse of the "Last Chance" section of the shop, and stock up on some future projects!
Thank you so much for buying shapes from us all these years, for choosing eco-friendly, for making beautiful quilts and sharing them online. I can't wait to enter the next stage of Tales of Cloth with you, armed with all that learning from experiments and mistakes and successes, with more clarity and passion. After I've packed up my house, of course! Blaa!
Happy stitching!
Jodi. xx
