Lisa Call

Structures #60 ©2006 33"x89"

This week I had to ship the 2 quilts going to Mesa, Arizona for the 28th Annual Contemporary Craft Exhibit.

One of the advantages of working in fiber is the ease of shipping. Nothing to break, the quilts are easily folded or rolled, and they are light weight. I’ve heard that the artist Faith Ringgold started working in fiber for these reasons. I don’t know if that is true but quilters like to mention this.

Unfortunately in addition to the quilt I usually have to also send a long thin wooden slat that is used to hang the quilt on the wall. The wooden slat slides into a pocket on the back of the quilt and then small holes in the slat are slipped over nails in the wall.

When I make my work I don’t worry about things like shipping and lately I’ve been making a lot of very wide quilts. So this week I had to figure out a way to ship a 90″ long 1″ wide and 1/4″ thick wooden board via UPS.

About 8 years ago I bought a bunch of heavy duty shipping tubes from YazooMills. I’ve used and reused these amazing tubes (the tube walls are about 3/8" thick) dozens of times and they are pretty much indestructible. I have never had a quilt damaged when I ship them in these tubes. I think I bought 2 cartons, both 6″ diameters and 60" and maybe 42" in length plus a few longer tubes that came as singles.

These are the longest tubes I bought at 80" and the above quilt needed a board 89" long so I thought about trying to fasten 2 tubes together.

But you will notice that UPS smashed the ends of these long tubes in the original shipment to me (partly because the end caps weren’t in place – partly because UPS must have gorillas working for them). I have shipped one of these 80" tubes once and it did fine.

But I didn’t think a tube that I taped together had much chance of surviving whatever it is UPS does during their shipping process to destroy things. I hear things fall off of a 8′ high drop, could be urban legend but they are doing something that isn’t very gentle.

So the next option was to think about a collapsible or folding board to hang the quilt. The few times in the past when I had to ship a board with a quilt of this size I used a heavy duty curtain rod that expands. It looked sort of okay with a large quilt but it’s a bit bulky and so on this very short quilt it really distorted the quilt and made it look crappy.

So I went to home depot and bought a bunch of hardware and hinges in hope of finding a workable solution to this problem that I could use in the future.

Not only is it a bit worrisome shipping such a long tube, it is also expensive as dimensional weight is applied to the shipment so I have to pay for 70 pounds of imaginary weight to ship just 14 real pounds.

The hinge was too thick and too wobbly. But I found I could use a metal bar to screw the pieces back together:

Assuming they can get the metal plate positioned correctly so the board is sturdy it should work great. I sent instructions to use duct tape to put the board back together if they can’t get the screws tight enough.

This is the 60" long tube that I used to ship the 2 quilts. The small tube is used to roll the quilts onto.

In this picture you can see that Structures #46 was rolled onto the tube first (right side out) and now I’m rolling #60 onto it. You can see the backside of the quilt (it’s folded in half as I’m rolling – part of my attempt to minimize stray fluff on the quilt – I use a lint roller as I’m rolling it).

After the quilts are rolled they are placed in a plastic bag and then put into the tube. The end caps are sealed and off it goes.

I can usually prepare, package and make shipping labels in about 45 minutes. This week I got stressed out over the long boards and it took me 3 days to get this job done. Pretty lame but there are occasions when I’m incredibly inefficient, and this month seems to be that time for me.

And now I’m annoyed at UPS because I dropped this package off at the store on Friday and it is still not in their system. I get very worried when they don’t do the departure scan as I have to sit here and wonder – hm – did the UPS person just take my package out back and put it in their car? Or is it really on it’s way to the art center? I guess I’ll find out Tuesday.

Thanks to everyone for the comments last week, I’ll go back in the next day or too and respond to them individually. I seem to have taken a small break from my blog, but I’m back. At least for now. I’m going out of town next week so I’m not sure if I’ll be blogging then or not. I’m going to follow my quilts down to Arizona and visit my dad and enjoy some sunshine for the holidays. I ordered 75-78 degrees but right now the forecast is only for the high sixties. Someone needs to get to work on fixing that.