Shipping a quilt

I had to take a break from my holiday recovery to repackage the Stars In My Hand quilt for shipment to the Road to California Quilt Show in January. When I received the quilt back from the IQA show in Houston, it was packaged in a long skinny box, rolled around a water noodle wrapped in acid free tissue paper. Very creative, that water noodle thing (and if you have no idea what a water noodle is, look here. We have a couple of the single noodles that the kids use in the pool at Garmisch when we go, but I had no idea what they were called. Google to the rescue.). Yes, you could roll the quilt around a cardboard tube from wrapping paper or something, but the water noodle is more stable, and won’t bend from the weight of the quilt when you pick up the roll to put it in the box.

I use the post office and have never had a problem. If I used UPS or FedEx, it would cost a small fortune to ship a box of this size and value internationally

This is one of those things that’s a bit scary, trusting the post office with an heirloom. I say “post office” because even though most folks ship things like this with FedEx or UPS since their tracking system is better (and maybe they have a better record of not losing things, though I’ve not seen solid stats on that), I use the post office because of where I live, and have never had a problem. If I used UPS or FedEx, it would cost a small fortune to ship a box of this size and value internationally, and if I declared it’s true value on the label, customs fees might be incurred either coming or going. Not cool to have to pay customs on your own quilt when it comes back from a show.

So the US Postal Service is the best option really, and it’s all in how you send the package. Read the rest of this entry »

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