I know someone who is a stay-at-home dad, whose home based business is selling stuff on ebay. His take-home is around $40K a year, after overhead and taxes. Not a lot of money but it lets him stay home while his wife works, which is what they both want. He had a few tips.
First, you have to build your reputation on ebay via their feedback system. Start by selling a lot of low cost items. Make sure that your response times are lightning fast, your packaging is more than adequate to protect the item and that you leave each buyer with a good impression.
Second, he said that higher quality stuff often doesn't sell well because the seller sets the minimum bid too *low*. It's counter-intuitive but his theory is that when the opening bid is low, potential buyers assume the item is of low quality. Set that minimum bid at the point where you are being fairly compensated for the materials and your time; if it doesn't sell the first time, wait a few weeks and re-list it for a higher price.
Third, make sure your photos are high quality and show the item from different angles and distances (close ups and distance shots). Check the background! Anything junky or messy in the background gives a bad impression. He said plan on taking 50+ photos of each item in the beginning in order to get 5 that are worth putting in your ad. As your photography skills improve, you will be able to take fewer shots but you will always need to take more shots than you actually show.
Fourth, make sure that your description tells the seller why the item is worth more than the minimum bid. He sells a lot of vintage postcards from the 1920s through the 1960s. He always includes a little history relevant to the time or place of the postcard so that potential bidders can place that vintage item in context (and we both felt old when he mentioned that for a lot of bidders, 1960 and 1970 and even 1980 are before they were born! LOL).
He said it is important to show potential bidders how your item is different from something they could buy at Wal-Mart. If you try to attract Wal-Mart customers, then you won't make a profit unless you operate at high volume with low to mediocre quality and low prices (which is not exactly feasible characteristics of a home based business!). You need to have a boutique mentality rather than a big-box store mentality.
I think for a quilt, a good description would include an estimate of the number of hours that went into cutting, piecing and quilting it. Along with the quality of the fabrics and how some of the design decisions were made (closely quilted for extra strength, cotton batting so that it can be machine washed, etc).
Hope this helps!