We’re in the news! And a virtual tour of the shop …

A feature reporter from one of our local TV stations popped by the shop last week to interview me about how the business has grown. You can check it out by clicking here.

There are lots of dramatic pauses in the voiceover and they picked some of the weirdest sound bites that probably sounded cool if you know nothing about quilting, but it is good for business, so I’m good with how it turned out. And if you look closely you can see a reveal of the 2018 Quilt Addicts Anonymous Block of the Month pattern!

I was cleaning the shop until the 10 p.m. the night before the interview. So I took a bunch of pictures the second the reporter and videographer left because I was fairly certain it would never be that clean again. So scroll down to get a virtual tour of our brick and mortar quilt shop. And just remember, that everything that is in store, is also available online at shop.quiltaddictsanonymous.com.

This is the view you see when you walk in the front door. We keep our latest fabric arrivals in the first room and everything else is in the second room. But everything else is less than six months old. We don’t like to keep anything around too long, so we are always having sales to turn over inventory faster.

This is the other side of the main room that you see when you walk in the door. My original quilt designs cover just about every section of available wall space. And I absolutely LOVE my cutting table. It is the perfect heigh and width for all the cutting we do for orders and Block of the Month kits. I have gotten to the point where I will not trim batting from the edge of a quilt at home anymore. I will stay at the shop until that part is over because I just love working on the table.

These shelves used to be in my house and they took up nearly an entire wall there too. I bought them when I was still working out of my home so I could store inventory in bins. At the time I just had pre-cuts, so this was an easy way to keep everything close at hand, but out of the way. Now they make perfect shelves for displaying pre-cuts out in the open for our in-store customers to see.

At one point the business space I now lease was a cafe and the beautiful wood counter with a copper top is still in place. It is fabulous for me because it separates our shipping area from the rest of the store and makes a great place to display smaller items like fat quarters, half yard cuts, bundles, Aurifil thread and pre-cuts.

This is the second room of the shop and it is where the majority of the fabric is located. I just love walking in and seeing the bold teal walls lined with bright white shelves that make all the bright, modern fabric pop. My very good friend Heather made the Quilt Addicts Anonymous banner using Jaybird Quilts Alphabet Soup book. She just loves Jaybird patterns, and was happy to make me a banner to hang in the shop and it fits perfectly above the shelves.

The blanket ladder is a new addition that I bought for my first quilt market booth. You can read more about that by clicking here. I decided to put it to use to display some of my original quilt designs that wouldn’t fit on the walls.

We have a large classroom that can comfortably fit 12 quilters. It currently is filled with Black Friday Preview Sale fabric and all the fabric I cut for the Quilt Addicts Anonymous 2018 Block of the Month. I’ll reveal more about that later …

Probably one out of every five people who walk into the shop ask if I offer longarm quilting services and the answer is no. I bought an APQS Lenni last spring when I did that math on how much it would cost to rent time on or send all of my quilts out to be longarmed for my first book that is due out next summer. I quickly realized I would be halfway to paying for a longarm just to send out all 12, so I opted to just buy one instead.

I just love having a longarm that I can use whenever I want and have been having a great time experimenting and learning new stitches and using templates to make some really amazing designs.

This is the very first magazine ad that featured one of my quilt designs. My aunt had it framed for me and we hung it next to Kaleidoscope, my most popular block of the month pattern to date. We’re trying to get our local customers to understand that Quilt Addicts Anonymous is much more than just a local quilt shop. So we’ll be adding more framed magazine ads and articles in the coming months so they start to realize the owner is growing bigger and bigger within the industry.

Here’s a shot of our front window featuring the tagline for a brick and mortar shop. We really want it to be a creative space where people get inspired by fabrics and patterns, learn new quilting skills and create something awesome. Plus I love how you can see our latest quilt in the window, the latest patterns by designers that inspire me and my antique sewing machines that line the window sills.