Letter-A-Day Campaign

Whew! It's been a wild few weeks.

When I tell people about the progress I'm making on the new weaving business they say things like, "Wow! This is happening so quickly for you. You must feel very lucky!" Yes, I do feel lucky. I also see the wisdom in the phrase "Luck favors the prepared." You may remember that I was looking for production work to sustain me while I develop, produce and market my own line of handwoven goods...

Thanks to many people believing in me, I got my production loom at the end of February. Not being one to count my chickens before they've hatched, I wrote several versions of a prospecting letter, but didn't send one out until I actually had the loom set up and ready to go. But as soon as it was ready, boy, oh, boy! I started an all-out campaign to get work with it.

This campaign was multi-pronged. Each day I went scouring my notes for the weavers I had met at crafts fairs and weaving guild meetings and logged their contact information into the Daylite contact management system. I then went looking for professional weavers that I hadn't met yet. I started sending out one contact a day: an email, a phone call, a letter. My goal was to find production work that would support me so I can reduce the hours at my day job, and eventually quit it altogether and make a solid living from my craftwork.

And then, Lady Luck stepped in. After sending out about 50 letters, I got a phone call from a weaver up in Oregon. She wants me to take over a large part of her fabric production so she can focus on making garments and selling them. This is exactly the scenario I've been wishing for. And, as luck would have it, she was the second person I had reached out to contact. She just happened to be out of town so the letter sat on her desk for a while before she opened it. I guess the spirits just needed to see me do all that extra work to make sure I was serious.

To make things even sweeter, it turns out that this is the exact scenario that *she* was wishing for as well. After years of weaving, she is ready to step back and let someone else do a bunch of the fabric production. She just needed to meet someone who is dependable and motivated. Call it coincidence if you like, but I know that there's a greater force at work here. Many people have said as much since I focused on starting a weaving business last year. "Some things are just destined, and your weaving is one of them," said one of my friends.

I am gratified to see that he single most important factor in securing this contract was my loom choice. That part is not a coincidence. I talked to about a dozen professional weavers to help me decide which loom to purchase. Every single one of them said essentially the same thing, “If you’re really serious, you’ll get an AVL Loom”, “I couldn’t make a living without my AVL”, etc. This new contract is possible because I chose a 60” AVL dobby loom. In order to minimize chances for error, my new client will do all the setup work. She warps the beams, threads the harnesses and sleys the reed. Then she lifts those parts out of her loom and gives them to me. I drop them into my loom and weave the cloth. There’s very little chance for error, and we’ll work with a lot of feedback for the first month to squash the errors that can still creep in.

So, if you were looking at my calendar and thinking about coming to my open studio day next Monday, I’m afraid it's cancelled. I'll be taking a four-day weekend in Oregon to visit the Wolf Creek Sanctuary and pick up a carload of supplies for the first few hundred yards of this big weaving job. I'll take lots of pictures of the experience and post them here for y'all to see.