About two months ago, I replaced the CAD system on my long arm machine and have been thrilled to pieces with that decision. I have quilted 6 quilts in the last two months. Which is fantastic. My goal was 1 quilt a month. I’ve made up for the first part of the year and then some. I’m all excited about this development until I looked around the sewing room.
Where there had been a pile of tops that needed quilting, now there is also a pile of quilts that need binding. I did not see that coming at all. I was so focused on the bottle neck of getting tops quilted, that I didn’t think at all about the subsequent need to get a binding on them. Granted binding is a lot faster to complete than quilting is, but still, it’s another step.
My background is in Industrial Engineering, which is all about process evaluation and improvement. I have seen many times in my work life, where addressing a bottleneck in a process, just uncovers that the next step is not optimized, but you don’t see that because the bottleneck ahead of it, throttles things down to where that step looks just fine. I have seen this enough times, I should have seen that this would be the case if I started quilting a lot faster than I had been, but no, this was a big surprise this weekend.
The good news in all of this, is that the new system does not require me to hover over it constantly waiting for it to have an issue. I can step away a bit, so now it looks like what I need to do is set myself up so that while I’m quilting something, I’m putting a binding on something else. Honestly the bulk of these will have binding finished by machine anyway, so I should be able to get through these fairly quickly. The key will be not letting a giant pile stack up of ‘to be bound’ quilts so that I face that mountain.
This whole situation has me thinking a lot about unintended consequences. We get so focused on one thing in life, that we don’t always think through all the things it might impact. Especially if the item is a proverbial burr under the saddle, we just focus on dealing with that one thing, and when that one things is settled, only then do we look around to see what effect it has on everything else.
This really is a good problem to have. I’m thrilled that the new system has proven to be so easy to use and that I can be so productive with it. I’m only getting started at using the full functionality so it will just get better. This is a good problem to have, to have it be so straight forward to quilt an all over pattern that looks so good that I’m cranking through quilt tops. It will slow when I start doing custom work, but even that is an EXCELLENT problem to have as I wouldn’t have even considered doing custom work with the old system (I did some but the system couldn’t do what I wanted to do, it’s not designed that way). More room for growth and I’m sure there will be a different unintended consequence from that but I’ll keep focusing on the positives and keep working those bottlenecks one at a time….
