Another year is ending and a new one begins

And how on earth did that go so fast? Well, I know the answer to that, partially at least. A lot of it had to do with this sweet darling little girl. She comes downstairs to our apartment almost every day for a visit. I cherish each and every minute of those visits. They cut into getting other things done, including blogging here, but they are babies for such a short period of time, and I don’t want to miss a thing. Our Grandson Avery, who is now 5...... how did that happen??..... has been down visiting over the past few days. Being able to spend so much time with Abbie often makes me regret the time we weren’t able to spend with Avery, since he lives 4 hours away. It makes my heart ache, which I am sure every other grandparent with grandchildren living at a distance can relate to.
We did our family Christmas celebration on the 28th, and got to spend some time with him then. We had planned on more time with him before he goes back home on the 1st of January. Unfortunately, both Scott and I ended up sick with the cold bug that’s going around. And it hasn’t been your average cold bug that just causes stuffy heads, but are still able to continue going. It’s been a flat on the back, no energy to do anything type bug, so we haven’t been able to see him.
This past year has been such a busy one. I’ve started writing patterns for publication. They are almost ready. Just a little editing left to do and pictures to add. The other hold up for the patterns is that I’m waiting on a business PayPal account. I tried setting one up on my own and came to a couple of sections where I had no clue what they were talking about, so I’m letting professionals deal with that. In fact, those professionals are building a whole new website for Eagle’s Wings Quilts, because we are expanding what we do. So far, it has been a long arm machine quilting business, dependant only on me to do the work. But in this next year we are expanding into sales. Specifically, we are going to be producing pre-cut papers for the English Paper Piecing market here in Canada. A group of three friends and I did Willyne Hammerstein’s La Passacaglia quilt starting several years ago, and ordered our books and supplies from the States. We all expressed the same shock at the price because of the difference in the Canadian vs the American dollar, and mostly because of the shipping costs. The shipping doubled the cost of the supplies. But we had to swallow it because there was no alternative. So, after much thought and prayer and research, we have decided to become the Canadian supplier for those papers. No more exchange rate costs and much cheaper shipping. It is likely going to be a month or two more before we are ready. The corel draw software needed to use the cutter, shown here in its home in the quilting studio, takes a bit of learning, but it’s coming. The goal is to eventually become the Canadian one stop internet based shop for all hand piecing, English Paper piecing and appliqué supplies. It’s very exciting, and very scary at the same time. But the best part about it is that it isn’t solely based on me. The whole family is in on this one, for learning the machine, and eventually picking orders and doing the shipping. I’m sure I’ll be talking about it lots more in the coming months.
Doing this has caused me to re-evaluate some other things I’ve been doing for a while, and revisit what I can and cannot do. I am definitely going to continue with lots of hand stitching, and participate with the Slow Sunday Stitching link ups . I’m continuing with the long arm quilting, both my own and other peoples’. I will hopefully be producing more of my own designs for sale, but that’s on a back burner as I learn the new software for the cutter. I will be reducing making quilts from other people’s patterns. I don’t think I’m going to keep track of stash this year. It seems to be one thing that I can safely leave off my “think about” list. One thing I would definitely like to do is produce a series of patterns specifically for the EPPing technique. I’ve noticed lately in my browsing through the Electric Quilt software that there are a lot of gorgeous complex designs that would be really difficult to do by machine. They have lots of odd angles, odd shapes and lots of pieces. They would be perfect for EPPing. They are totally different from anything I’ve seen out there right now. They should be showing up in my Slow Sunday stitching Reports as I test them out.
Well, that’s our hugely momentous news. I will post more as I know more. It is going to be a fun ride!