Don't Wait to Be Invited! Planning & Hosting a Quilt Retreat

Written by: Cheryl Koranda

Quilt retreats can be an amazing way to build or grow your own quilty community! Next month we'll be hosting our first Longarm League retreat with our members, and as Jess and I reflected on the impact quilt retreats have had on our own personal and professional lives, we thought this would be a great time to share some insights and tips for hosting or attending a retreat.

So this month we sat down with our good friend Kristen Olson of Heartfully Handmade to talk all things quilt retreat. Kristen has been coordinating twice-a-year quilt retreats for the past 8 years - in fact that's where Jess and I met! Kristen always does such an amazing job for our group, and we had a great time talking to her about the ins and outs of planning and hosting retreats.

While our full discussion is available to League members, we wanted to share a few tips here on the blog as well.

Before we dive into talking about retreats, I wanted to make sure to mention that Kristen currently has some great deals on fabric, patterns, notions and more in her online shop! She's closing out the fabric portion of her business as she moves into jewelry making. While her jewelry is not yet on her site, you'll want to keep an eye out for when she switches over her shop as she does amazing work. You can follow her and keep up on here latest shop updates on Instagram, she's @heartfullyhandmade.

Quilt Retreat Options

If you haven't yet attended a quilt retreat, we strongly encourage you to jump in and give it a try! It can be a great way to make friends, learn new techniques and skills, and create lasting memories.

There are many options for attending and hosting retreats:

• If you'd like to dip your toes in without having to do any of the planning yourself, a great first option can be attending a hosted retreat. Look for a local quilt shop or retreat center that is offering a retreat with individual rates; these can range from sleep-in-your-own-bed events with some food provided, or may include sleeping space and all meals as well!
• Another option would be to plan your own retreat. You can start small by looking for a retreat house in your area; these are often houses that have had a room, garage, or other area converted into a dedicated crafting area. You rent the entire house and then can sleep and retreat there. Occupancy sizes vary but tend to be on the smaller side of a handful to a dozen people.
• Or you could go bigger and rent a dedicated retreat center. These are often more expensive and require a larger group of ~15 or more people to fill the bed space and make the retreat affordable.
• We found that Rona the Ribbeter maintains a list of retreat centers for each state in the US. What a great resource!

Tips for Hosting

Here are a few of our top tips for hosting your own event:

• Worried you won't have enough attendees to fill your retreat? Try asking / advertising the event through a local quilt shop or quilt guild, or ask people you've met through social media.
• Use the app Splitwise for tracking expenses if you order group dinners or have other multi-person expenses. At the end of retreat the app will tell you exactly how much each person owes and who they should pay, putting everything into the fewest number of transactions for you and making settling up easy peasy!
• Plan a game or two to help the group interact as a whole and get to know each other. There are lots of fun and short quilt-related games out there such as trivia or bingo, just Google to find lots of options.
• Don't worry about planning excursions and having a strict schedule. Most people who are coming to retreat are excited to have focused time to sew; you don't have to make plans to entertain them throughout the event.
• If possible set the tables up in larger groups instead of small pods; this helps everyone get to know each other better, be able to converse easier, and see all the fun projects everyone is working on!
• Lastly - white noise or fans in the bedrooms + earplugs are game changers! Most retreat houses and centers have multiple beds per bedroom - with people going to bed and getting up at different times, snoring, etc., having some background noise and using earplugs can help everyone get a good night's sleep.

If you'd like to listen in to our full conversation with Kristen, and are interested in starting or improving your own longarm quilting business, we'd love to have you join us in the League! You can get started with our free video, The Three Pillars to Building a Profitable and Sustainable Longarm Quilting Business.