It had been a long long time since I had been asked how much I charged for a quilt. Honestly, I didn’t have a very good answer…in fact I had no answer other than “I’m not sure”. The man wanted a quilt for his six year old granddaughter. Something girly and a more grown up than a baby quilt but he didn’t want to spend a lot of money. I mean she is a six year old right. His only request was that “Sweet Pea” be on the quilt and if I could fit it on, the little girls name; Garbyella.
Truth be told, I had been working on some tedious stuff and was looking for a project that provided me with a sense of accomplishment. And a chance to work with some FUN fabrics. Gramps had been doing some work on the house and I wanted to keep the cost down. I went through my juvenile and novelties stash and came up with a fair amount, but not quite enough. So there was an opportunity to shop, and I did. It was fun as I had discovered a couple of new to me quilt shops in my area as I’ve only been here about a year.
It wasn’t long before I had fabrics up on the design wall and the lettering done for her name and nickname. That was a new thing for me to do!
The quilt went together fairly quickly as I needed to keep it simple. I’m calling it an “entry level” quilt. My quilter, Terry Burris Quilting was able to turn it around for me quickly. And with some of the scraps I was able to make a pillow case.
There was still one more thing I wanted to do. Part of the reason Gabryella was getting a new quilt was to stop dragging around her old one. So I went the next step and made one for her dolly so she would still have something to take with her.
Her baby dolls name is Mya. The backing of the baby doll quilt is the same that I used on the twin quilt and the pillowcase.
This was just the distraction I needed to feel a sense of accomplishment! So what do you tell people when they ask, “How much do you charge for a quilt?”
divadiversion 
Jeff figured out a formula for me to use that helps. Multiply length x width to get number of square inches in the quilt. Divide by 1440, which is the sq. inches in a yard of fabric (36 x 40). Multiply that by the cost per yard of your fabric, then times 2 to include the back. I add up the number of inches around the quilt and multiply by .10 (10 cents per inch of binding). Add that to your other total, plus cost of batting and thread. Then I multiply by 2 or more to get the cost. I charge more for hand quilting (a lot!) and there are variables such as difficulty of design, how much quilting, etc. I found this helpful so that I had a base to start with.
This is very helpful. I’m going to try to use this the next time the opportunity arises. Also good if someone asks how much would you take for that quilt. That way I’m not undercutting my work or caught unaware. Probably a good idea to know what the approximate values of the quilts in the house are. Thank you so much!
P.S I LOVE Gabryella’s quilt. How did you put the letters on?
That was fun! I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it. First I looked into stencils. Nothing was the right size and I couldn’t find a font I liked. Finally I came to the computer, on my “word” program, found a font I liked, printed out the letters then copied them, making them as large as I needed them. (Beloved was an enormous help here!). I’m thinking the font size was 76 and we copied it at 200%. When we got the letters done, I cut them out and traced them to the back side of wonder under (backwards), then adhered them to my fabric, and pressed them to the block. There has to be a more streamlined way to do this, but this worked well enough for this project.