Let's start at the very beginning... it's a very good place to start.

In September I left my job at AccuQuilt. I had learned so very much there and met some truly incredible people while working there.  I fell head over heels in love with quilting while I was there. We were supposed to be able to  quilt every week for 2 hours and toward the end of the time I was there they actually did start teaching classes. Truth be told we were so busy in my dept that those two hours never happened for us so I started coming in early and going into the aptly named AccuQuilt Dream Studio on my lunch breaks. I even started staying late after work so that I could learn enough to speak to my customers. When I started I think I was the only one who had never started a quilt so the need to get a class going was pretty low on the list of things that actually needed to happen.
I may not have received scheduled lessons at AccuQuilt but I did have access to Janome, Babylock, and Bernina seing machines. A Sweet 16  and a Avante' Handi Quilter quilting machines,  oh and EVERY SINGLE DIE AccuQuilt made or ever tested!  you name it and it was there. I will however admit that although I was surrounded by tens of thousands of dollars in quilting supplies the real  prize was the people. I was literally surrounded by people who loved to quilt and create and their passion was contagious.
On Feb 14th 2013 my incredible husband bought me my very first sewing machine.  It was a Hancock Brother machine with a long table and more stitches then I will ever use. It came with all the goodies I would need to free motion quilt and although it was slow  which led to HUGE stitches it helped me finish my first 27 quilts in  9 months.
At the time my husband and I were cutting cost by sharing one car. We still had our farm truck but the gas prices basically kept it in dry dock. Every day we would leave our house in Omaha at  6:30 and Casey would drop me off at AccuQuilt where I would quilt for an hour he would then come and get me after he was done at work in Louisville,NE. Typically around 7:30. Basically I was getting an hour before work, 40 min at lunch and 2.5 hours after work. I started building patterns for Island Batiks  Quilted in Honor and with the help of AccuQuilt I started The Samuel Quilt Project which in less then a year has given quilts to 1200 people affected by natural disasters.  Basically my whole life was wrapped up in quilting. This would have been a good time to join a 12 step program for quilting addicts.
On the September afternoon when I found my self baffled sitting in my car with out a job and fresh out of dry kleenex I had no idea what was going to come next. If you had told me that in less then 3 months I would be moving to Clarinda, IA  and opening a quilt and yarn store I would have never believed you. But that is exactly what happened. It turned out quilting wasn't the only thing that was contagious at AccuQuilt. I had caught a bad case of American Dream Fever and the only cure was an opening day in mid December.

This is partially a story about a quilt shop, it is also partially a love story, and its also a story about the American Dream still being available to those who still want it bad enough. Do you have a dream? What are you doing  to go get it ?