Tales Of A Fourth Generation Textile Executive: Seeing & Hearing Good Things About #SewDays!

Happy Monday & happy early 4th of July!  I am proud to be an American.  We are so lucky!  Our offices are closing on Tuesday July 3rd  at 1 PM and we are closed July 4th.

I hope that you have had the opportunity to watch the fabric-tainment on my Scott Fortunoff Executive Facebook Page.  If not, it isn’t too late as all the videos are still there.  Within the last week, I visited and did store Facebook live tours at three lovely shops.  I am having a blast making these videos.  I get the opportunity to bond with the shop owners and that is very positive for business relations.

The first visit was to my LQS called Gotham Quilts in New York City on 37th street.  Next I headed to Oley Pennsylvania to Gail Kessler’s Ladyfingers Quilt Shop. I participated in making pillowcases for a local charity.  In fact, you can see a video of me sewing on an awesome Bernina 790 because that’s how I roll!  LOL. To round off my travels, I went to Colchester Mills in Connecticut.  On top of the tour and the FB live at Colchester, I spoke about the fabric industry in front of around 75 consumers.  We had some great laughs and everyone was very appreciative.  Not only that, but one of the customers gave me a donation for my sewing machine giveaway.  By the way, I just bought another pallet of machines to give away later this year.  I digress.

The tours and stuff are not the point of this blog though. The blog today is about how the #sewrevolution #sewdays events are working.  Yes, they are working!  For starters, I have seen posts allover Facebook of people taking part in the festivities.  I love seeing quilters of all ages showing off their projects and smiling ear to ear.  It’s a beautiful thing to see….very refreshing and encouraging.

More importantly though, in speaking with the owner of Colchester Mills, Cheryl, I got a real flavor of how successful the events have been for her.  I am hopeful that Cheryl’s experience has been much like the experiences of the 150-200 other shop owners participating in the #sewdays events.

At Colchester, they have 6 machines to let people use and those 6 spots were filled at just about every class.  It doesn’t sound like much, but it is.  Let’s say that 16-18 people participated over the 3 events.  I was informed that the majority of the participants were either new to quilting or they had been on a fairly permanent hiatus.  In other words, there were some brand spanking new quilters and there were others who wanted to come back to quilting. Yeah!  Yes!  Woot WOOT!  I love it!  This is what it is all about people.  Rome was not built in a day and we need baby steps.  If you ask me, these are baby steps and the #sewrevolution is marching on with the wind behind it’s back.

All this news makes me optimistic that the #sewrevolution can have a positive impact on our industry and help to grow the number of quilters and sewists around the world.  I look forward to spreading the word about the next #sewdays events.  Please consider getting involved if you didn’t do so the first time around.  With that, and on a very positive note (I am happy), I want to give a huge shout out to Laurie Harsh of The Fabshop Network and Karen Montgomery of The Quilt Shop in Allison, PA.  They are the brainchildren of this entire program and the industry owes them a debt of gratitude for stepping up to the plate to kick start this movement.  Moreover, I want to thank all the sponsors who took a leap of faith to be a part of this first event.

Finally, I wanted to let everyone know that I, Scott Fortunoff, will be participating in a #sewdays event at Karen Montgomery’s shop on July 12.  Thankfully, I just got a great sewing lesson from Gail Kessler so hopefully I won’t be a total embarrassment.  I am very excited to be a part of the action and see it all for myself.  In addition to participating in the #sewdays event, Karen is hosting 75-100 customers at a local spot where I will be the guest of honor talking about all that is going on in my fabric world.  If you are in the area, please reach out to Karen right away because this event is close to being sold out and I would love to see you.

Have a great week!

#sewdays #sewrevolution Scott

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This is the sewing machine I give away for free. Please feel free to purchase one, and give it away too! Or Recommend it! Or love it!