Why does ScrapStashtic Quilts look like a clunky book?

               Did you know that ScrapStashtic Quilts was written by accident?

I developed the ScrapStashtic System over the span of about 5-6 years, testing and refining along the way. (Of course, the system didn’t have a name- I was just trying to figure out how to stay on top of the overwhelming supply of scraps that seemed to multiply like rabbits in my studio!)

The big change:

When my daughter went to kindergarten, I decided to keep myself busy with a long arm business. One problem… in my area, being a quilter, and being young enough to have an elementary school aged child meant that I wasn’t ‘old enough’ to be good at quilting. (Never mind that I had almost 25 years quilting experience at the time!)

Hmm… ‘too young’ to be trustworthy…. I know! I’ll go start a blog! Then, no one will be able to see that I don’t have grey hair, and I can just take in quilts by mail!

So, I started a blog- with absolutely no idea what I was doing.

The blog chugged along nicely for about 4 months, picking up subscribers and giving me an additional creative outlet. Then, in May, I was feeling overwhelmed by an influx of scraps from a few sources.

(Here, Jan! You make such fun scrap quilts, and you never seem to have bins of scraps sitting around, let me clean out my scraps to you!)

I felt overwhelmed. And maybe a little miffed. Because even though it wasn’t stated, I felt like I was being used as a ‘scrap dump’ by all the quilting friends who didn’t know how to stay on top of their own chaos in the sewing studio.

But… I also loved the excitement of getting a new pile of scraps to play with.

So, in stead of turning away the plethora of scraps that were finding their way to my studio, I sat down to write a simple blog post about how I deal with scraps… so that hopefully some more people would learn to do what I do. (And stop asking me to clean up their quilting mess.)

I started to write my blog post at the beginning of May. And then, I kept writing, and writing, and writing. At a furious pace. Around May 14^th, I began to suspect that this was going to be a ridiculously long blog post, and may need to be broken down into a series of blog posts on the subject. I kept writing. Around May 22, I began to suspect that I may have been writing a book.

And when I finally finished writing my ‘blog post,’ ScrapStashtic Quilts had definitely become a book.

I conned a girlfriend into ‘helping’ me construct the graphics. (OK, I actually begged Kelsey to digitize my stick-figure quilt designs for me… all told, there were over 100 graphics in the book.) Constructing the graphics flowed right into designing the layout and formatting of the book, and Kelsey kept learning more, new, and different computer skills in order to make my book come alive on the page. She literally learned how to build the plane, while we were flying it!

And, while Kelsey learned graphic design through trial by fire, I sat down and taught myself online marketing, self-publishing, and audience building. (All skills you need if you are going to publish a book.)

It was a whirlwind summer, and a TON of work and learning… with a steep learning curve. By October, the eBook went live, and when the print book went live on December 15^th,  Scrapstashtic Quilts was only 10 days from hitting Amazon Bestseller.

It stayed at the top of the best seller’s list for a whopping two weeks, and has continued to thrill readers around the world. Grab your copy and start taming the scraps in your sewing studio!