Quilter's Garage Sale

Hi, have you ever looked around your sewing room or your sewing space and discovered that you have a lot of things that you really aren't gonna use or maybe are not gonna use. You'd like to get them out of there, but you'd love to get a little money for them. And there are a few ways to do this. And I'm just gonna share with you the ways I think are ways to get the, have the most successful, project, in terms of getting rid of things and getting a little cash back. So, first of all, if you want to sell things, you can get online.

And I really have had success with Craigslist and eBay. If you go on eBay and you look under quilt fabric, you'd be amazed what people are selling. And the bottom line is you're not gonna get anything like what you bought it for. If you're buying fabric for $10 a yard, you're not gonna get that back. But you know, you'll probably get five, if it's in good shape.

You might end up with three for something that's not very attractive. If it's brand new fabric, and I guess, you know, we all can buy fabric that we decide, Oh, golly, I already had this one, or, I really don't like it. You can get a higher price for fabric that's newer, Or if it's something rare that people are looking for that they haven't reprinted. There are some Jinny Beyer fabrics from 20 years ago that people really want, and they're hard to find. So, try eBay, try Craigslist, and then in some areas, you can find a fabric consignment store.

I live in the Denver area and we actually have one here, where you will, you end up selling your fabric inexpensively. You don't get a lot for it, but you get something, to a store. And then they, it's like a resale store, a used store for fabric, and that can be another way. Okay, when you're talking about things in your sewing room that are taking space that you want to get rid of. You can look at a, go to a used bookstore and take some of the quilt books that you're done with and maybe get some money for it.

You can also put things into your guilds sale if you belong to a Guild and you have a once a year sale that you can do that. But the one that I think really gets you the best money is a garage sale. I'm gonna tell you how to do that. Okay, first of all, you want to advertise it. So again, you're going to Craigslist and you're going to put on there quilters garage sale and the dates.

And you want to put that into Craigslist about a week before a good week before. So people can plan their weekend. And you want to be very specific about the times and the days. So if you're going to be doing this on Friday and Saturday and you're starting at eight o'clock in the morning and you absolutely are closing at four because you know your kids are coming home. You need to put that in eight to four, period, end of sentence, all right?

And another place you wanna advertise in addition to Craigslist is a quilt guild newsletters. Now, maybe you don't belong to a quilt guild or there, you know, many in your area, well you can go to quiltguilds.com and you can find all the quilt gilts in your area. Even if you don't know who they are, another way you can find a quilt guild because this is really your audience. If you're talking to people if you're advertising to quilters, of course you're gonna get the best turnout. So another thing you can do is ask a quilting friend, Hey do you belong to a quilt guild?

Do you know somebody who does? Who could I contact to put an advertisement in the newsletter? And you can ask your quilt shop your local quilt shop will know the guilds and they'll know how to contact them. And the other thing you can look at are, you know neighborhood bulletin boards, maybe at your library or if you go into, you know, other kinds of stores, sometimes in fabric store, you'll have, they'll have guild information, that kind of thing. So this is how you find a guild.

And when you want to have your garage sale you need to talk to the guild people. You need to really tell them at least four weeks in advance maybe even six, because you know they're working on the newsletter ahead of time. And the other really good part of that is that you are holding yourself to a time. You know, you can't put it off. If you said I'm gonna do it on this day it gives you time to do it.

A couple other things to get the best response to your garage sale. If you have time, and I know this takes time. If you do have time, if you can package some of your fabric in just little pretty things, just like they do in a quilt store, you're going to make more money. So if you have been buying, you know, fat quarter packs and there's some fabrics in there you're not going to use they're already folded into fat quarters. Just take the ones you don't like.

It doesn't matter how many, you know, how you put them whether they match or not. If you do have say three that match, put it together as three, if you have a number of them together and somebody loves one fabric they might buy the whole thing because they really want that one fabric. But remember you need to price your things at about $3 a yard to get rid of most of it. So just make a little stack, tie ribbon around it and you're set to go. Another thing you can do cut two and a half inch strips, roll them up to make your own little jelly roll, put a ribbon around it.

You know, look how pretty that is. And that will sell a lot of fabric because a jelly roll is actually about three yards of fabric. And you'd be surprised. How about Halloween or Christmas? Go ahead and put things together by holiday, wrap this one with a black ribbon, put a price on it.

And it's more likely to sell than if you just have, if you had these individually someone might take one or two, but if they are all in a group, you can probably get rid of more fabric. And one more quick little thing, actually, a couple. These are just 10 inch squares that I've cut into 10 inch squares. You can put them in a Ziploc bag and just put on there what the contents are, 25, 10 inch squares hand dyed fabrics and a price, all right? That's really quick and easy.

And if you're trying to sell bigger chunks of fabric you know what I'm talking about, half yards or three yards or whatever, and it's kind of hard. How do you display those so they're pretty when you have your garage sale. Well, here's what you do. You just get pants hangers like this out of your closet and you can hang collections on here. You can hang a big, big like a backing and other pieces like this.

And the thing is you can, it doesn't have to be a collection. It can just be pieces of fabric you have that are longer. And if you have a storage, you know a storage bar where you hang extra clothes in the winter you can do a bunch of these hangers just hang them on there. If you don't, one thing you can do is just take a sturdy rope and just fascinate across the opening to your garage and hang it that way. Because when they're hanging, people can see them all.

And if you have them just folded in a heap they're not going to be nearly as pretty. So this is the best way to get money at your garage sale. And I hope you have fun with your garage sale, and I hope you make a ton of money and if you have a bunch of stuff left over, cause you sure can, don't put it back in your sewing room if you're trying to get room in there. Go ahead and donate it, give it to, like Project Linus or give it to Goodwill, and you'll be really glad you did and you'll have more room in your sewing room too and a little cash in your pocket.