Threadbias- Kickstarter

For those that don't know about Threadbias, it's a free online forum for the quilting and sewing community, to show their finished projects, ask for help and advice from their peers, and to sell patterns and tutorials.  It's kind of a Ravelry for the sewing machine addicts of the world (and hand stitchers of course).  

In addition to their free area, they are currently developing a Quilt Design Tool.

Quilt Design Tool

Now this part of the website won't be free, it will be available by subscription, at a low start cost of around $10 a month (about £6.00), although lifetime or annual subscriptions will apparently be available.  However, this is an expensive tool to develop, and they want it to be just perfect (i.e useable and intuitive for the computer clueless like me!) and to do that, they need some help. So they are running a Kickstarter drive to try and get the funding from the online community it will serve.  


Kickstarter is similar to Crowdfunder for those who are familiar with it, it's a funding option, where you pledge an amount of money in exchange for a "prize", e.g $10 for access to the prototype plus 1 month subscription to the tool once its up and running (expected to be Spring 2013). There are larger "prizes" in exchange for bigger pledges.  There is a full write up and explanation of their aims and goals for their campaign, definitely worth a read considering Electric Quilt is available at a cost of around £160, ouch, that's around 26 months of the Threadbias subs- it's definitely given me something to think about.  But not for too long, their Kickstarter deadline finishes in around 21 hours (about 6am in the UK on the 31st of October), they've already achieved $6000, of their $20,000 goal, and they do tend to go up significantly in the last 24 hours- if they don't reach their goal you don't pay a penny!

This could be your chance to give feedback and input to a brand new tool that could really help with your quilt design.  And by the way, I am in no way linked to these guys, or paid by them- it's just one of those things I think is worth a look, it isn't intended to be a sales pitch!

Ange x