This video popped up in my YouTube feed yesterday:
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| Watch the video here: |
If you go to the Quilts, Inc website, you can read the full story:
If you are not a shop owner, pattern designer or industry influencer, you may have never attended the market portion of the annual Fall Houston quilt show. If so, check out this video to get a glimpse of what it is like:
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As well as some perspectives by a quilt business that attended this year:
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| Their discussion starts in the video at about 23:00 minutes in. |
So what does this mean, if anything, for us quilt industry customers? It certainly is another sign that the industry we love is changing by leaps and bounds. Following on the heels of the closures of Joann Fabrics (BTW, great video on the history of that here) and Martingale Publishing and the recent deaths of popular industry names like Donna Jordan of Jordan Fabrics (see her last video here) and Daniela Stout of Cozy Quilt Designs (her last update was given here), it can feel like the industry as we know it is collapsing in on itself.
Or maybe it's just time that it downsizes to something more modest than the billion dollar recreational industry it has become. Could we even see a day when it fully returns to its roots as just a cottage craft?
I know for me, I will be clutching my stash going forward and waiting to see what the next evolution will be.
3 comments:
Hey, Vivian. Check out this post: https://www.brigitteheitland.de/blog/houston-quilt-market-2025. It's how she wraps it up at the end that is uplifting, suggesting that the industry is not in decline so much as it is evolving and changing to match the sewing interests and capabilities of younger generations who were not taught any needle crafts growing up. I thought about what she was saying about the "multi craft" textile shows that were doing better, and how wonderful it is when details from garment sewing "crossover" and become flanged or beaded quilt bindings, or when a quilt pattern designer is influenced by knitting or crochet patterns. I like the idea of a show that has All the Yarns, Threads, Fabrics and Goodies -- including quilting -- rather than a narrow quilts-only focus. Most heartening, the most recent industry survey showed that the quilting industry IS still growing and the overall number of quilters remains steady, but the growth is just at a slower rate. That makes sense as so many quilters are now self-identifying as Stashaholics, introducing themselves like "My name is Nancy and it has been 42 days since the last time I bought fabric." But seriously, the commercialism and to-quilt-is-to-shop, "she who dies with the most fabric wins" attitudes of previous decades seems to be giving way to concerns about sustainability and the environment. When the quilting industry was really booming, a lot of that growth was fueled by retirees with disposable income to spend on their hobbies. The young moms I am starting to see at quilt guild events are way more apt to be using thrifted sheets as backing and "making do" instead of running out to the LQS to audition the perfect 108" wide backing fabric, for instance. They are also just as likely to bring a knitting project to a guild meeting as they are to be hand stitching EPP. Ooh, that's another trend that would shrink "industry profits" but not necessarily be bad for quilting as a craft. In the 1990s through 2010s or so, it seemed like patterns and teachers talked about traditional hand stitching like it was a disease people had to suffer through before a vaccine came out. Now I am seeing more quilters, especially younger ones and even beginners, who are deliberately choosing hand stitching projects for the relaxation and peace that comes from being totally unplugged from technology and just working with your hands. Well, people who are hand sewing quilt tops are working a lot slower than machine stitchers, and they are going to buy a lot less fabric overall even if they are spending twice as much time working on their quilts as machine stitchers. All of these trends result in lower sales for quilt shops and fabric manufacturers.
Thanks for the link to Brigitte's post Rebecca! I do agree, as I said at the end of my post, that this may just be a "correction" as opposed to a devolution. I too welcome the change to more diversified "craft events" as opposed to "quilting only events" as I started life as a multi-crafter and even as my involvement in quilting grows so has my interest in other things.
The ironic thing about the "She who dies with the most stash wins" mentailty, is that it came out of the era when the variety of quiIting cottons was NOT as expansive as it is now. Earlier quilter's couldn't always easily get "just the right color or pattern" so stashing when they found something useful was a must. The problem is we as a market have never adjusted that mentality once the fabric industry evolved to offer more and more and ever more as they do today! So a correction was perhaps inevitable.
I also have no problems with the idea of being more "make-do" as I've always admired scrap quilts and having a been a "clothing sewing fabri-holic" from way back had set out to avoid doing the same as a quilter (and I've succeeded in some ways and failed in others, LOL!).
I also feel "on trend" having purchased the "Modern Abstractions" line designed by Bentpath Studios for Blank Quilting which is very similar in style and coloring to Brigitte's new "Mira" line but using blue where she used black. I had picked it up during this year's "All Carolinas Shop Hop" which is also changing it's dates for next year so I likely won't be participating in that again in the future, sigh! No matter what you do, "change is gonna come"!
"Earlier quilter's couldn't always easily get "just the right color or pattern" so stashing when they found something useful was a must." Aha! Thank you for that, Vivian -- I had read that when the "quilt revival" kicked off in the '70s and '80s quilters had trouble finding suitable 100% cotton fabrics to work with, before the advent of dedicated quilt shops, but I had not made the connection between a mentality of fabric scarcity and the stash hoarding culture that was rampant by the time I started quilting in the early 2000s. Even the beginner quilter books I have that were published in those years taught the "necessity of building a stash" with lights, darks, mediums, florals, geometrics, novelty prints etc. That makes so much more sense if you can't just pop over to your local quilt shop and count on them having just the right fabric to finish your quilt.
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