Printed circles for grandbaby – Part 1

This is 90” wide fabric that I purchased to make the youngest granddaughter a quilt for her bed.  I barely have time to piece lately, so whole-cloth is the way to go when I need something done.  The fabric arrived just as I was about to finish the last of the 3 customer quilts I did and I looked forward to do something for myself without a deadline or an eager customer waiting for me to finish.

Well, as the saying goes, life happens while you are making other plans and just as I had this fabric loaded, I got a call from another quilter in need of my services for her quilts she’d like to bring today.

Stepping back a bit….  I was grateful for the quilter who brought me 3 quilts at the same time.  I’ve been contemplating changing my pricing system.  Up to now, I’ve charged per square inch but soon realised that it is not really fair to some.  One quilter might bring me a full sized bed quilt but request simple meandering or overall edge to edge quilting which may only take 3 hours while the next would bring a small wall-hanging or table runner and want this to stay flat against the wall or on the table therefore they need dense quilting and often ruler work and this can easily take 5 hours for something really small.

So with the 3 quilts received at once, I checked the timer on my machine which only calculates the time the needle moves, the timer on the phone which adds up all the time I actually spend time behind the frame, thought what I’d like to earn, should this be a full-time job without being ridiculous, and then compared the new hourly rate to my previous square inch rate and now I feel much more comfortable.  Sadly the quilter receiving intense quilting with plenty of markings and ruler work will have to pay more but the quilter only wanting meandering won’t have to pay an arm and a leg to have it done.

So with this quilt, I wanted to test the time for ruler work on a larger quilt.  I decided to outline every printed circle twice, inside and out and only free motion the areas in between and this again proved how time-consuming ruler work can be.

To ruler one take (roughly 12 inches) full width twice around all the circles took up a full 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Filling the open areas between the circles with free motion loops, again full width, took less than 20 minutes.

I got this top to where it lifted from the floor but guess, after work, I will have to baste the rest to keep all intact in order to load the customer quilts. Only almost halfway and this already took up 8 hours.