Sambelina

Well, I don't know where I'm going from here. The shop has dropped me from the program - I get the impression they think this was very big of them because they have a no cancellation policy. They have offered to sell me the patterns for the remaining months at their cost plus shipping and the large floral fabric, again, at their cost plus shipping.

I forwarded the last email I received from them to Sue and to the pattern distributor, Quakertown Quilts. I don't expect there's anything they can or will do, but I thought they should know what has been going on.

At this point, I have everything through the pinwheel border. I could probably stop there and turn it into a table topper. <sigh> No one in my quilt-y group is going near that shop again. Since our local shop closed, we had been hoping to find a BOM to do together and we had been looking at Homestead Hearth because they have so many programs going. They're off our list of possibilities now - big surprise.

sweetana3

I am so sorry to hear about your problems. I got a kit once from Homestead Hearth that had been gathered as a BOM. There was only one tiny error and it was fixed in the subsequent month. With the hundreds of pieces and parts to this kit, I was amazed at how well the kits were set up. Every single piece of fabric, no matter how small, had a label with all the info on it. I had zero problems with the complex Lori Smith pattern also.

I have also gotten fantastic service from the Fat Quarter Shop and their designer BOM. I bought a BOM kit several years later, from a quilter who never started it, and it was missing a pattern. They sent me a PDF of the pattern within 48 hours of my email. Great service and nice people. Plus I love the fabric.

I would also suspect that Stitchin Heaven would have good service since they run a huge BOM program.

Sambelina

I can confirm that every piece of fabric I received was labeled, and if I had received all the fabric I needed each month, I probably would have recovered from the bad start to the program. A sampling of the issues ...

Monthly kits were missing fabrics. The pattern distributor confirmed that the cutting instructions were at fault. I can deal with mistakes - they happen. I didn't like waiting six weeks for the missing fabric to arrive. They elected to send the missing pieces with the next month's kit and then inexplicably delayed sending that kit for two weeks. And oh, by the way, adding the missing fabrics to that month's kit put it over some weight limit so it had to come priority mail. Yeah, it's just a couple of bucks, but the message of that bothered me - hey, you get to pay for the privilege of receiving your fabrics late.

The program was repeatedly delayed with little to no communication from the shop. It was supposed to start November 2011. We got an email that there was a problem with the fabric - a delay from the supplier - and they would ship an "alternate" beginning in December. They did not do that and there was no communication from them about the program until the first kit showed up in May 2012.

That's the way the whole thing has been - a very strong feeling of "get in line; we've got something else to do while you wait."

Yuck.