Preview of the Longarm League's Group Call with Jenae Alves of Vintage Stitch by Jenae

'Business Builders' are members that have already started their longarm quilting business but are looking for ways to optimize their systems or grow their client base.

On the third Wednesday of each month, our Business Builders meet for a Group Call. We meet via Zoom so that it's interactive, but then we also record the calls so that anyone who is unable to attend the live meeting can watch later. Anyone who joins the Longarm League at the Business Builder level can access our whole library of previously published lessons and recorded calls. 

Today was our one year anniversary of adding the Group Call feature. In the last year, we've covered the following topics:

• easing the fullness of a quilt
• additional income streams
• cloud-based accounting
• Profit First
• creating a brand
• collaborating with designers
• search engine optimization (SEO) for beginners
• small business taxes
• running multiple longarm machines
• common Instagram mistakes
• Sew Tites Magnum magnets and other loading methods
• quilt photography

This brings us to the topic of today's call: A Question and Answer session with Jenae Alves of Vintage Stitch by Jenae.

Jenae has been rockin' and rollin' in her business, especially in the last year. She had a lot of things she wanted to share with us and was available for our questions, too.  

I thought you might enjoy this short clip about what Jenae does when she buys a new pantograph and how that helps when it comes time for her clients to choose a design for their quilt top. When I refer to others' questions in the clip, I was reading the chat to get real-time input from what members on the call wanted to know about.

This whole one-hour call was so good! In a true collaborative spirit, one person's ideas sparked a new thought in someone else and we came away with some great ideas to try for the organization of client quilts, the pantograph cataloging process, how to network and make connections with other industry professionals like pattern designers, and how some of Jenae's designer collaborations came about. We also talked about a clever idea for participation on Instagram when sponsoring a grand prize for free quilting, Jenae's intake process once she gets a new quilt in her studio, using a P.O. box to receive quilts, narrowing down choices when a client has no idea what design they want, offering binding services, trimming and charging for trimming, and using "store-bought" binding strips.

On the subject of binding, I'll leave you with Jenae's binding tutorial using glue basting that is saved to her IG story highlights. Go to her Instagram profile, it's located here:
 

I hope you enjoy this short preview. We'd love to have you join us someday to watch the whole thing! 

One of our core Longarm League values is "collaboration over competition" and today's call was an example of that ideal coming to life. It's really beautiful to be a part of the open sharing and celebrating of this service we offer our quilting communities. It feels good, not to mention that it's fun to talk shop with others in our niche!