This would be a good option for learning LAQ'ing before buying a long arm. But, the 'rental' charge being near equal to a shop doing it 'without your participation' eliminates this idea for me. I make lots of quilts and with more being set aside for donations/fundraising, the outlay for LAQ'ing is painful when cost for fabric/supplies and labor are already invested. I'm thinking that reducing project sizes to wallhangings or other manageable DIY free motion projects is more logical. And, perhaps prices will be more affordable for bidders or buyers.
Perhaps a LAQ'er might set up a non-profit enterprise and invest in supporting community service quilt makers? I wonder if that's in place anywhere.
Originally Posted by
Sewnoma
There are two shops near me that do this; one is about 2 miles from my house. I keep thinking about doing it, but the cost seems pretty high to me. My local stores have a 3 hour class @ $60/hour; so it's $180 just to learn. Then renting time is the same $60/hour, in 1-hour increments. I figure it'll take at LEAST 2-3 hours to quilt a queen or king size quilt, and that's probably pretty optimistic... That time DOES include having a skilled employee there with you the whole time to help load the quilt and deal with any issues (and also probably to keep an eye on their expensive machine!) so that's helpful and will certainly save some time. Both shops seem to have pretty much identical pricing and policies.
So I'm torn...I don't want to send my quilts out for quilting because then I don't feel like it's fully "my" quilt. But paying that much to do the work myself doesn't quite make sense to me either. Then again...I don't have the space for my own LA and even if I did it's nice to know that if the machine has tension problems or breaks down it's not going to be MY problem. I make kind of a lot of quilts, though, and there's no way I could afford to spend that much to quilt all of them there, it'd have to be something I only did for very special quilts...
So I'm kind of all over the place on this one. I don't think the prices are unreasonable, I'm just not sure I'm willing to pay it.