The first post on this site opens with a sign I painted in 2016. What I left out is that I wasn't the only one starting something that year.
My sibling Heidi had just moved to Richmond, and we had a plan to do it together. We were going to be the Start Small Sisters. Heidi had a woodshop and a home decor project. I had, and I am not kidding, a dog treat / farm idea. Neither of those turned into anything, and then a decade went by.
Except Heidi's sort of did. Heidi kept making things the whole time, just quit trying to sell any of it, on purpose, and the story below tells you exactly why.
This is the first of a new series. We want to profile makers, creators, and generally brilliant people at every stage of it: the ones starting small right now, the ones stuck at the starting line, the ones who already launched, and the ones who looked at launching and said not right now. Heidi is the last kind.
I sent Heidi ten questions with a simple ask: ramble into a voice note. What came back is the best case I've heard for making something with no plan attached to it, which is a funny thing to publish on the blog of a business that sells the things it makes.
The 2016 version
Take me back to 2016. You had your decor projects, I had the dog treats / farm idea. Why do you think neither of those stuck?
In 2016 we wanted to do something sort of together. We were living in different places, but we wanted a thing we were both working on. I had just moved to Richmond, and there's a huge maker community here. I loved making things, I'd just moved into a new house, and I had a great space for woodworking. New move, recently married, new job... I wanted more going on. Something else in my life to do, to create, to make things.
At the time I thought being part of the maker community here meant making things to sell, doing markets, maybe a website eventually. A second income stream. I was never thinking it would replace my income someday, just something to make a little extra spending money.
So I did about three or four markets. It was really exciting when we got accepted, because sometimes it was hard to get accepted. As a new maker you don't have photos or previous sales or a big social media presence. We had items at all different price points. I didn't do a ton of research on what would sell. I was focused on what I enjoyed making.
And then, doing those markets, I realized, gosh, this is a lot of work. Packing all my merchandise up was hard because it was wooden art, so I had to bubble wrap everything, and it's heavy, and it's hard to display. It wasn't as easy a setup as some of the other makers I saw. We didn't always recoup even our table fees. Ouch.
We found pretty quickly that people might think it was interesting but they didn't see a need for it, which is fair. So my brain went, oh, now I have to think about what's actually going to sell, and try to make things that appeal to an audience at a market. And I realized, that's not why I got into this. I got into it because I like to make things and I thought it would be fun to try.
Once it turned into making things for a specific type of customer whether or not I enjoyed making them, that took a lot of the fun out of it for me. So I decided I'm just going to keep making things for me, in my own spare time, and for my friends, and focus on that.
When did quilting enter your life, and what made it different from other things you'd tried?
Around 2020 or 2021. I'd always been a sewer. I sewed when I was young with my grandmother, and I made my prom dress in high school. I think Kim did too. So I always knew how to sew.
When the pandemic hit I thought, I can make masks. I know how to sew, I have a sewing machine. So my wife Julie and I started really making masks, giving them out and donating them, back in the days when you couldn't buy KN95s. They were out of stock, so we were making fabric ones.
And then I was on Instagram and saw a quilt and thought, oh, that's neat, I'm going to try to make that for Julie. So I made her one for her birthday in August, and I made it entirely in secret. Somehow I was able to say oh, I'm going to go upstairs, and hide the fact that I was making her a sixty inch square quilt.
When I look at it now I think, oh my gosh, this is so amateur. I was such a beginner. But I think with starting small, it's good to learn that the only way you get to learn is to be a beginner first. You're not going to naturally know how to do everything, even if it comes easy to you because you already know how to sew. There are things you learn along the way that make the finished product look a little better.
I joke about getting rid of that quilt and making her a new one that's better quality. She says no. She wants to keep that one. She likes that it's the first one I made for her.
What it actually feels like
Describe what happens in your brain when you're quilting. What does "quiet brain time" actually feel like?
I call it my quiet time, or my calm time. Part of it is that it's repetitive, and the repetitiveness puts me in a flow state where I don't have to make decisions. You are kind of making decisions about where you're placing the fabric, but not as many. Your brain is just executing. Being tactical instead of strategic. In my day to day I have to do more long-term, strategic thinking, and this is just make-it-happen work.
I love math, my day job is in technology, and I love solving problems. I think that's what appeals to me about both quilting and woodworking. They're both very math-heavy crafts, and in some ways very precise. They don't have to be precise, but in some ways they are.
A challenge I have with both: for whatever reason I don't have the color matching gene. I'm not colorblind at all. I just look at two things together and think, yeah, that looks great, and everyone else says no, you should never put those together. So that part is harder for me.
When I'm quilting it's really just executing. Cutting, ironing, sewing the pieces together, repetitive. I don't think about anything else while I'm doing it. Sometimes I'll have the TV on, or an audiobook, or music, but really I'm just sewing, and I'm alone, and I'm enjoying myself. It's relaxing. The wood shop gives me somewhat of that feeling too, but it's a much louder, dirtier hobby. It's nice that with quilting I can go for a half hour and not feel like I need an immediate shower.
You've seen the social media content about being faster and more efficient. What's your honest reaction when that shows up in your feed?
I saw a post recently, I don't remember who it was or even where I saw it, about how to be faster at sewing something together. Half square triangles, I think. There's certainly a place for that, and I can understand wanting to be accurate and wanting to be efficient.
But my reaction was, oof, I don't want that in my quilting. In any other minute of my day-to-day life, being perfect and being the fastest is normally super important to me. When I'm quilting I'm not thinking how can I make this faster. I'm thinking, this is fun, I'm enjoying myself.
It got me thinking that the goal might not always be to make it more accurate or more perfect or faster, but rather to make the process more enjoyable. It helped me realize it's okay to have some things in your life where efficiency and throughput aren't things you have to optimize.
What does a quilt look like when it's made purely for fun versus when you feel pressure around it? Can you even tell the difference in the finished thing?
I always work from a pattern. I haven't done anything really independently designed. A few things, but generally I'm using a pattern that's been sold by a designer. Legit makers who create patterns, I follow them on Instagram, buy from their website. I've done piecing, foundation paper piecing, and a little bit of EPP, which is hand sewing. I've never done anything completely improv or completely self-designed.
A lot of times when you say you're making something just for fun, people think that means you're flying by the seat of your pants, doing whatever speaks to you in the fabric. That's not what I do. When I'm making one for fun it generally means I'm not going to be gifting it. It's for me.
I do have one or two I made for us that used higher quality fabrics, or took a longer effort to build. Those were more work than my casual fun quilts. But when I really think about it, at the end, the final product isn't much different whether it was made for fun or whether I put pressure on myself to make it a certain way, or perfect, or as a gift.
That's probably important for me to remember while I'm making it. It doesn't matter if I'm giving it to someone else, or if it's a quilt I've been dreaming of making for years, or if it's a quick project to move through some of my fabric stash and get a quick win. They're all still fun. They all have fun memories when I look at them. And they all generally feel snuggly on the couch. So I should probably try to attach less meaning to them that way.
Maybe the exception is a t-shirt quilt I made for a friend, out of t-shirts that belonged to her brother, who passed away when he was young. Something like that has meaning to work on and is a little emotional, but for different reasons than almost every other quilt I've made.
So many quilts
You've said "oof, we have so many, I need to stop," and Julie says nope. What does Julie see that you forget in those moments? And where do the quilts actually go?
Let's say we have ten of them stacked in the living room, and four or five stacked other places, plus some seasonal ones. Not even that many compared to some quilters, but we do have a lot of quilts.
Sometimes I think, gee, there's no reason we need all these. Why am I still buying fabric? Why am I still sewing quilts if we don't truly need them? Sometimes I give some away, but I also don't want to make them and be a burden on someone who doesn't want the pressure of, I don't really need this, how do I keep it if I don't want it. And sometimes I just really like them, so I want to keep them even if we're not using them.
For some reason, when I look at them in the living room, I think, we have all this stuff and we don't use it. It stresses me out. I feel like I'm not doing the quilt justice because I'm not using it.
Julie's like, no way, you made it, we're keeping it. And the thing she really points out to me is that it isn't about the end product. Sure, it's nice that we have a quilt to cuddle up with, or keep us warm, or look at and appreciate. But what she sees in my making them is the process. What it does for my mental health to have that space to be calm. How it helps me relax, to have them to make. I need to realize it's not just about what I have at the end and how I use it. It's the experience of creating it, and the calm it gave me.
Where they go: most of them live rolled up in a basket-y thing in our living room. A few are displayed on a quilt ladder. The seasonal ones are tucked away, and we try to remember to pull them out for Christmas, or Valentine's Day, I think I made one for that. We've gifted plenty, so they're in friends' and family's beds, or with their kids if it was a baby shower gift. I've donated some for fundraisers. They're everywhere, honestly.
I need to release the thing where I look at the basket and think, oh my gosh, we have so many. It's not a bad thing. I enjoyed making them. Buying fabric and sewing them isn't making us go broke. It's okay to have a lot of quilts, and I can keep giving them away.
Hobbies that don't need a reason
What would you say to someone who thinks a hobby needs a purpose, a shop, a following, a reason, to be worth doing?
I definitely struggled with this at first.
You have permission to do a hobby just for fun. To spend money on it, if it requires that. To just enjoy yourself. You don't have to sell the products you make. You don't even have to use the products you make. Just have fun doing it. And I know that can be hard, to give yourself permission to do that.
For me it's the mental health part that really matters. Think of it like going to the gym. Sure, you potentially want to gain muscle, or get stronger at doing certain things. But part of the benefit is just being there, having your brain turn off or turn to a different place while you're there. Working with your hands. Learning how to problem solve in new ways. Quilting genuinely helps me think about problems differently. And it gives you permission to play, which is something we don't do enough of as adults.
Don't feel like you need to turn your hobby into an income stream. Just enjoy the process when you can.
Has quilting taught you anything about yourself that surprised you?
It's helped me realize that I'm really hard on myself, that I'm a perfectionist, and that I expect to do everything perfectly the first time. It's been a really good opportunity to work on that in therapy, and to start to see that perfect isn't a goal. It's not something any of my quilts need to be. In the end, when I look at it after I'm done, chances are I won't even notice.
It's also taught me I need to learn how to be more proud of myself for my accomplishments. Kim and I were raised to believe we could do anything, which sounds really great, and it was. We can accomplish anything we set our minds to. We can be creative and make anything we want to make. But sometimes I don't recognize the accomplishment in my quilts, because I think, anybody could do this.
And I truly think anyone can make a quilt. I don't know if they'd all enjoy it, but if we took the time to learn, anybody could do this, if they had the time and the capacity, and of course the resources, the money, the machine, the fabric. Outside of those obviously big barriers, you could learn this if it's something you wanted to do. So I don't feel like I have some skill or talent other people don't have. What I have is a lot of privilege, to have the time and the capacity to do this for myself.
What's next on the table
What's the next quilt? Do you even plan that far ahead?
Things are changing. In the past I'd see a pattern I liked, buy the pattern, pick out fabric, and save it all in a little tub. So I have a bunch of tubs, maybe twelve by twelve by six inches tall, with labels on them for which quilt I'm going to make and the fabric to make it inside. I don't always buy the backing, just the fabric for the top, and I might go buy the backing later. Most of those I purchased six months to over a year ago. I also have a bunch of fabric I bought just because I liked it, or it was on sale, with no quilt planned for it. It's just sitting there.
A lot of quilters have what we call a UFO, an unfinished object, or a work in progress. I have about three quilts in progress right now, maybe four or five ready to get started sitting in tubs, and a ton of fabric.
And then today, actually, good timing. There's a quilt I've been interested in making for about two years, but it's a big time and a big fabric commitment, so I hadn't prioritized it. The fabric for the top is going to be around $250, and the backing would be more on top of that. We generally say as a couple that if something's over $100, we talk about it before we buy it. So I asked Julie what she thought, and she said, well, let me see a picture of the quilt. She wants to make sure she's going to like it if I'm putting that money and time into it. We talked about it, and I'm going to try to buy the fabric in the near-ish future and make it.
So I guess I do kind of have a plan. Obviously if there's a gift coming up I try to squeeze that in, or if there's donation block work I'll squeeze that in. But I don't have them set out in an order. I try to do a scrappy, easy quilt, and then plan in a more complex patterned one, and rotate them to keep it fun for myself.
I'll also stop a quilt if it's not fun. There's one I started a few years ago that I'm looking at right now. More than half of it is done. I'm going to love the final project, but oh, it's a lot of work. So I don't work on it as much as I should. Sometimes I say to myself, just do one row a week, and then you'll be done in thirty weeks or whatever it is. I don't stick to that either. Maybe I need to find a way to stick to it so that in a year I'll have a finished quilt. It'll be beautiful, it's just not enjoyable. So luckily I've put it aside.
I work on what's fun. Sometimes I squeeze in one of those future quilts, and other times I just want a quick win that's enjoyable.
What I love about Heidi's story
Heidi did the thing everybody tells you to do. Made something, took it to market, priced it at every level, got accepted into shows that were hard to get into. But when Heidi paused to reflect on where things stood, the decision to step back was an easy one. The products that would have been popular from a numbers perspective were not what Heidi wanted to make.
The best line in this profile is the gym analogy. Nobody walks up to you at the gym and asks what you're planning to do with the muscles. Creating for the joy of the process is the reward. I'm working out what that means for me.
If you know somebody who belongs in this series, whether they're mid-launch, stuck at the start, or deliberately not launching anything at all, tell us about them.
— Kim