Quilters Calendar - for Teachers and Students

The Quilter’s Calendar - Connecting Quilters, Quilt Guilds and Quilting Teachers

Quilting teachers Maggie Ball and Marguerita McManus became friends when they met at a trade show in 2007 where they were both promoting their new quilt books. Rather than seeing each other as competition, they shared marketing tips, teaching experiences, and a common frustration.

Many quilting teachers rely on guilds hiring them to teach classes to their members for a significant portion of their income. With a quilt guild in almost every town in the USA and over 21 million quilters in the USA, the challenge for teachers is how to reach guilds and how to make it easy for quilters and guilds to learn about available teachers: their classes, specialties, talents, styles and schedules. Most teachers rely on a combination of word of mouth, random connections made at trade shows, websites, emails, mailed media and hope.

A central location of easily accessible data would help tremendously. Somewhere that guild members could see who’s teaching nearby (and when) that would also provide information and links to the teachers.

The Quilter’s Calendar is a searchable online calendar that presents teaching engagements by location and date, making it easy for guilds to share the expenses of hiring a traveling teacher, thereby reducing expenses to each guild. Listing a teaching gig is free to the teacher or guild and so is the Teacher’s Profile, which includes a link to the teacher’s website. Guilds can save money and teachers have the opportunity to be hired more often without additional effort or expense.

Additionally, many quilters love to travel to quilting related events. Quilt shows, retreats, even when visiting family, quilters will often find a way to attend a quilting related event. By using the calendar and searching by their destination location, quilters will easily find classes and events that would otherwise have taken hours to search out.

Created by Marguerita McManus, co-author of the best selling “Crazy Shortcut Quilts” book and YouTube Partner with over 1 million views to her videos, the site debuts with over 80 Teacher Profiles and more than 850 Teaching Engagements, throughout the USA and Canada, into 2015. Marguerita created the Quilt Designers Blog Ring in 2007 and continues to share marketing information with entrepreneurs on a YouTube channel.