Starting A Machine Quilting Business
Quilting is a well known hobby and crafts pastime, but is also known to be a very good business. It’s quite easy to get started quilting on a machine and it can be a lot of fun to play with color and different kinds of fabric even without using a fancy pattern. It is a great hobby because it combines traditional patterns and techniques with modern equipment.
A quilt is really just two pieces of material sewn together with some kind of batting or stuffing in between to make the finished quilt warmer. There’s no rule that says the top of a quilt has to be pieced or that there has to be a lot of elaborate sewing to hold the pieces of the quilt together. It’s just two layers with something between them.
Starting out a business with quilting is easy as long as you have the love for crafts and have a creative and free mind to go with. Quilting can be very intimidating because crafters think that a lot of intricate skill and precision is required. While this is certainly true of complex designed quilts, there are quilts you can make with no more skill than knowing how to sew a straight line.
What You Need For A Machine Quilting Business
Get started by learning quilting, if you have some background and experience then it would be much easier to get started on making your quilts. If you are new to quilting, don’t get frustrated, be patient and learn quilting, its not hard as long as you’re dedicated to learn. Quilting as most misconceptions are easy to learn. And developing more complex patterns and designs would be easy enough when you have learned the basics.
Get started in making your quilts, look for basic patterns in books and in the internet. Many offer free patterns that you could use in building up your quilt library for your shop. The best way to get started is to do projects for friends and relatives, have them criticize your work and creations. This way you could also show them that you interested in starting up a new business and might arouse some interest to join in with you.
When you’re in a roll and feel that you could start out selling, make sure you already have a niche, a community of people who knows that you’re starting up, people who could easily be prospect customers. Start buying your supplies in bulk so you could lessen expenses and maximize profit. Start advertising and getting a wider community know of your new business.
Growing Your Machine Quilting Business Over Time
When you get your sales going don’t stop making quilts with patterns and techniques you know, as many fields require learning is a never ending process and would certainly help your business with variety and innovation. Educating yourself would never be that difficult it’s only up to you to find resources that would enrich your knowledge and skills.
Make sure that you have fully made a transition from hobby to business, it’s important that your mindset has already shifted to just having fun to making profit and earning. This doesn’t mean that this business shouldn’t be fun, but to make sure you are serious in making this business succeed while having fun doing it. This would make sure you could continue and make your business grow, and later on reap the rewards of your hard work. Do what you do best and start on acquiring and hiring people for your business. It’s always great to take employees in a growing business knowing that you could never handle it all by yourself. Make a concrete plan so you could always look back into your outlines, but make sure you’re flexile enough to deviate form this plans and make changes depending on your growth.
