The Life Of Your Quilt At MLQC

Delivery Day!

 It gets delivered to us by our friendly neighbourhood Canada Post delivery person. We take all the boxes into our office, and we mark them with the date that they arrived. That way we know for sure when they got here and we can get them into the quilting queue in the right order.

 We open the boxes, one at a time. We match each quilt with the order that you placed online and a printed copy of the work order. The arrival date is marked on the work order, as well as the expected completion date. This is USUALLY about 4 weeks, but it can be as short as two weeks or as long as six weeks if we are really busy.

 We read through your order form and highlight all your choices - thread colour, quilting pattern, batting choice and we also check for any special notes you have written for us.  

Notification Of Arrival

 Next - we send you an email to let you know your quilt has arrived safely, and to give you an estimation of our target completion date, based on our current work volume. Remember, if there are extra steps for us in the process - such as piecing backing fabric or repairing open seams in your quilt top - it can delay the completion of your quilt.

 If you ordered backing fabric from us to complete your quilt, we will pull the bolt right away and cut the amount needed for your quilt. The backing fabric will stay with your quilt top for the rest of its journey through our store.

 Depending on how many quilts we have in the lineup, your quilt may go onto the shelf to wait, or it may be hung up right away. All quilts are completed in the order that we receive them into our store, so try to get it into the mail as soon as possible after you place your order.  

Let's Get Prepping!

 As your quilt moves up in the queue, it will have its turn to get “prepped”. During the Prepping process, we check out your quilt top and backing fabric. We measure them and make sure our measurements match what you entered on your order form.

 We also make sure the backing fabric is large enough to fit the quilt top (the backing needs to be 4” larger than the top ON ALL SIDES (in total, 8” longer and 8” wider than the quilt top). For more information on this, check out our blog here **** Sending your Quilt to Be Quilted *****

 The other thing we check at this point is to see if your quilt top and/or backing are directional - do they have fabric or designs that need to point in a certain direction? We also take a look at the quilting pattern you have selected to see if it is directional and to make sure we line it up properly so it corresponds with your quilt top. We mark both the quilt top and the backing with a safety pin to let our quilters know which edge gets mounted at the top of the frame.

Hey Batting, Batting...

 Next, we cut the batting. We include a single layer of Hobbs 80/20 batting with our quilting service. Some customers prefer to send their own, and that’s ok too. We make sure the batting is the right size for the quilt, and it gets a pin to indicate the top as well.

 The backing fabric and quilt top get pressed, and then all three layers are hung up on our heavy duty quilt racks in the order they are to be quilted. Throughout this whole process, we make sure that the work order (our printed copy of your order form that you submitted online) stays with the quilt.  

When your quilt gets to the front of the line, it will be mounted onto the frame of one of our Innova Longarm quilting machines and the quilting will begin...