The question is "Why work with Accomplish Quilting?" The answer is simple: they are dependable. What they say they will do, they do. What they say will work, will work. They are there for you and you can depend on it. That's why we are associated with Accomplish Quilting. We rely upon their judgement and so should you.
It started with me being a "quilting husband". As a quilting husband you either tag along or sit at home and watch the game on TV. I choose to tag along.
We took long vacations pulling our Coleman Pop-Top trailer. We also took along the, now out of print, Quilters' Travel Companion. In the 1990's it seems as if every town, city, burg, hamlet, nook and cranny had a quilt shop. And we saw them all.
Our youngest son, Peter, accompanied us on those trips. They took us through the entire US, West of the Mississippi, as well as British Columbia and Banff in Canada. Our son would proclaim "Not another quilt shop!" And, we'd all chime in.
Ruth went her way through the fabric to see what she could use. Pete and I would talk to the longarmer and usually get a pitch to buy a longarm. We never bought, but Ruth sure did!
One fine day in 2003, I was sitting in the basement/den and it occurred to me that Ruth could use a longarm from time to time. I knew that Gammill was the best at the time and so I contacted them. They referred me to their Ohio representative, where I lived at the time.
It was an interesting discussion. It was November and I wanted the machine by Christmas. The Gammill dealer stated that they could not procure a machine that quickly because they needed to buy two machines at a time and at that time they already had one on order. So, I said, "Now you have two. I'm paying cash". They then repeated that they ordered two at a time and that they only had one on order. And.... You get it, it went round and round. Ending with a "Goodbye".
I then looked on the web and found Accomplish Quilting. I called them up and gave them my spiel. Jeff Benedict, on the other end of the phone, said "Yes! When do you want it?" A couple of weeks later Jeff shows up and sets the free-motion longarm up in the basement. He even proved adept at sending the parts for the frame through the open basement window.
We then took a lesson from Loretta Benedict, Jeff's mother who owned Accomplish Quilting with her husband, Clarence. We were now ready to do free-motion longarming, after a lot of practice. We had a lot of questions and the phone was there for us to get the answers from Accomplish Quilting.
Wouldn't you know, that in just three months, the longarm turned into a full-service quilt shop. The shop was complete with employees and a second Gammill!
We got the second Gammill from Jeff at Accomplish Quilting as he had come through for us before. But, this time BOTH Gammills had the automated Statler Stitcher attached. We had committed to having paid longarmers that we trained run the machines. We wanted the automation so that, no matter which person did the longarming, it would come out the same. I did not want to have a situation where people would specify which longarmer the wanted to work on their quilt.
As the years passed, as did our health. we stopped doing national shows and shut down our 4,000 bolt, 45" fabric area. We narrowed our focus to longarming only, as it was the profit center of Forever In Stitches.
Jeff had problems with Gammill, and he switched to the superior Innova platform. We had the opportunity to trade in both Gammill/Statler Stitchers for two Innova AutoPilot Mach 3, one of which has Grand Format Embroidery. Again, this was with Accomplish Quilting. We took the opportunity because of past service and support.
One day, Jeff and I were discussing our various business problems. He stated that his staff was spending too much time supporting the customers as opposed to sales. We had experience developing multi-media training materials, so we took off, for three months, creating the self-study training materials shown below.
