While She Naps With Abby Glassenberg

On today’s episode of the Craft Industry Alliance podcast we’re talking about building a career as a modern quilter with my guest, Jen Carlton Bailly. Jen is a founder of the Portland Modern Quilt Guild, the largest modern quilt guild in the world. She had a career in retail before becoming a mother and modern quilter and carries many of lesson she learned in those years over to her current work. In this conversation we talk about discovering a craft community online and in person. Jen explains how modern quilters first connected online via Flickr and then came together in her local community to form a guild. Jen's blog is called Betty Crocker Ass and we discuss what it's like to have such a standout name for your website. She explains her mixed feelings over the years about possibly changing it, and why in the end she chose to keep it. Jen has a line of quilting templates out and she talks about creating and selling a signature product and the challenges with scaling the business. She also beginning to sell