What’s With This Weather!?
We design quilts for QUILT magazine and often work with Fabri-Quilt fabrics. When we got an emergency e-mail from Lisa Ruble of QUILT for a quilt for an upcoming issue, we got on the phone to our Fabri-Quilt contact (Anne) to find out if they had fabric that we could have in our hands in a day.
First let us explain—the emergency came in on Thursday and was “We need a quilt with Fabri-Quilt fabrics in Florida for photography by the middle of next week. Do you have anything in the works?” We didn’t, but 7 days is plenty of time to make it happen. The fabric company is in Missouri; we are in Maine. Overnight shipping makes everything possible!
Anne e-mailed images of a new collection called Blue Skies. Beautiful blues, chocolate brown, leafy greens—all colors that disappeared under layers of snow a couple of months ago here in our state. We worked up a design and e-mailed it off to Lisa. She said, “Yes!” We ordered the fabric from Anne, phew, done … nothing to do but wait for the UPS guy to arrive on Friday. We would stitch like crazy on the weekend and have the finished quilt off to Florida on Monday.
And then ANOTHER BLIZZARD hit! We waited and waited for UPS on Friday with Anne sending us tracking updates regularly. Until the dreaded e-mail: at 2 p.m. UPS pulled their drivers off the road, so no more deliveries until Monday.
The rethinking began. Could we whip up the quilt top, quilt it and bind it in only 1 day and be able to overnight it on Tuesday by 4 p.m. to be in Florida on Wednesday? What if UPS doesn’t show up with the fabric until late afternoon on Monday? It seemed impossible, but we had no choice.
Until Saturday morning rolled around. Sandy spent a sleepless night worrying about the problem. At 10 a.m. (opening time), she called the local UPS store. The package is at the distribution center in a nearby city. At 11 a.m., a worker at the distribution center peeks out to see who is pounding on the door. A wild woman (aka Sandy) demanding a package of fabric! A search of the building located the package. Sandy was out the door, into her 4-wheel drive truck, and on the phone to Sue. “Meet me at the shop, we have fabric!”
And so, another happy ending. The quilt was stitched, quilted and bound and out the door on Monday—right on schedule—another deadline met. Everyone is happy. Well, there is that UPS worker whose hair stands on end at the mere mention of the word “fabric,” but surely he’ll get over it, right?
Sue and Sandy
Pine Tree Country Quiltswww.pinetreecountryquilts.com
Tags: Sue Harvey and Sandy Boobar
About the Author: Sue Harvey & Sandy Boobar
Sue and Sandy have nearly 40 years of quilting experience between them. Sue began quilting in the mid-1980s after everyone in her family and all of her friends decided they didn’t have another inch of space for anything cross-stitched. Sandy started in the early 1990s because she was so jealous of a quilt that a friend had made that she learned how to make one of her own. They have been working together on quilt designs for five years. They each also have their own quilting business. In 2005, they decided to start collaborating on quilt designs, a fabric shop and kitting business. They formed Pine Tree Country Quilts, named because they each live in a grove of pine trees in the middle of Maine. They regularly design and make quilts for several magazines and fabric companies and put together fabric kits for their designs. They sell their kits and patterns to quilters around the world by phone and from their Web site, www.pinetreecountryquilts.com.
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