Today, I bring you a giveaway from SouleMama Sponsor, Alewives Fabrics. In Rhea's words:
"Alewives Fabrics has been in business since 1978! In the fall of 2004 the shop was purchased by the mother/daughter team of Barbara Neeson and Rhea Butler. We carry a huge selection of quilting weight cottons, but also flannels, wool, corduroy, voile, velveteen, home-decorator weight sateens and canvas, plus lots more!
Rhea keeps a blog that is equal parts shop news and random personal tidbits at AlewivesGirl.
SouleMama: Tell us about the beginnings of your business.
Rhea: The old red barn that houses our business was once a general store that belonged to my great great uncle, Ernest McGray. My grandmother was Ernest McGray's niece and she worked here as a teenager, pumping gas and selling groceries to the locals… every once in a while she still lends a hand here at the shop, all these decades (we won't say how many) later! Over the years, the building and business were sold out of the family. In 1978, under different ownership, the building and business became Alewives Fabrics and we've been Alewives Fabrics ever since! I began working here in 1998, when I was just 19 years old, but in 2004 my mother Barbara Neeson retired from teaching art at the local high school and brought the building and business back into the family. We've never looked back and feel so fortunate to be doing something we love in a building with so much family history!
SouleMama: What's the product or offering that you are most excited about in your shop/class right now? Tell us about it.
Rhea: About a year ago, we purchased a long-arm quilting machine for the shop with the intention of taking both our local and online customer's unfinished quilt tops and stitching them into finished quilts. Sometimes a large quilt (or even a small one), can just be too much of a hassle to quilt on your own, and we've found that once our customers have a quilt top professionally quilted for them once, they never go back to tying or quilting on their home machines! It definitely took a while to get the hang of things, but now our long-arm quilting service is up and running, with the fabulous Anne Fossett working full-time at the helm. Our local customers have already discovered that they love the idea of handing over an unfinished quilt top, choosing a backing fabric, batting, thread & quilting design, and then letting us do the quilting for them. It's a great value for the money, and certainly helps preserve your hard work for many, many years. We are VERY pleased to announce that we are now taking long-arm quilting orders online! There is a simple form to fill out, available on our website here. Once we receive an order, we contact our customers right away to further discuss the finer points of what their specific quilt will need and answer any questions that the customer may have. We're so excited to receive quilt tops from all over the country (and maybe someday from all over the world) and return finished quilts to our online customers, too!
Rhea: This past spring I was happily surprised to learn that I am expecting my first baby, a boy due in December, and of course that will bring about lots of changes at the shop! I will be a mother for the first time, and my mother will become a grandmother for the first time. We're both so excited and it has been fun (so much fun!) making baby plans and of course stitching up little baby clothes. We are extremely fortunate to have an amazing team of 3 women, all of whom are mothers and/or grandmothers, who work for us full time. We rally around each other in times of sadness and in times of happiness in the wonderful way that women do. With the happy expectation of a new baby on the way, there have been lots of schedules to rearrange and lots of slack to be picked up. It's not always easy to wait on customers in "real time," while also maintaining a busy online shop and making amazing kits and samples, but these gals make it look effortless! It wouldn't be possible to have this baby and keep the shop running so "seamlessly" without our amazingly talented and dedicated staff.
For today's giveaway, Alewives Fabrics is generously offering the following to ONE winner:
~ Poison Apple fat quarter bundle!
(Alewives Fabrics is excited to debut and give away another fat quarter bundle, hand picked by Rhea especially for SouleMama readers! This bundle of 20 different fat quarters is called "Poison Apple" and contains deep, dark prints in lucsious hues of purple, navy, black, dark gray and just a bit of acid green and candy pink. Designers in this bundle include Anna Maria Horner, Amy Butler, Kaffe Fassett, and also some hand-printed batik designs from Bali!)
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To enter today's giveaway, please leave a comment (one entry per person, please) in today's post. I'll close comments by 8am EST on Sunday, and announce the winner, chosen via Random Number Generator, shortly after. Comments closed! The winner is....
Fantastic Fabric! Fantastic Folk! Thanks for the opportunity!
Posted by: SPJ
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Thank you, Alewives Fabrics!
