Quilter who isn’t very good at retirement decides to start one more business

At 72, Dottie Evans has had a full career in human resources and teaching at the college level, but she’s had one issue.

“I’ve had a challenging time retiring for final retirement,” she said. “I thought one more time, I’m going to own a business.”

Evans decided to start White Crane Designs to share her passion for quilting with others and, as her tagline says, “create memories one stitch at a time.”

She said she’s owned several business, “But I never felt as passionate about an endeavor as this.”

Evans has been quilting seriously for the past 20 years.

“As a retirement gig, I thought why not do it for others, too?”

She said it makes her money, feeds her passion and helps others in several ways.

“There are a lot of people out there who enjoy the history of quilts, the idea of quilts,” Evans said.

She said a lot of people want to give them as gifts, such as T-shirt quilts for graduates to save all their high school or college T-shirts in the form of quilts.

“I can help them make that gift that they don’t have the skills to do or the time to do.”

The second group Evans said she can help is people who create pieces of quilts but never make a full quilt. She said she can “help them get a finished product.”

A third group Evans said she wants to help is people who don’t have the equipment she does, most notably a longarm quilting machine.

Evans first tried quilting in her 20s. She and her mother used to make her clothes.

“Bless her heart, she had kept the scraps of almost everything.”

Her mother would make quilts with the scraps.

Evans said her grandmother made quilts, too, but she said, “She was one of those who did piecing but never did quite get the quilt done.”

So Evans took her grandmother’s scraps and tried making a quilt.

“It was such a large project.”

She let quilting go in her married life, but then a couple of decades ago, she went into the Ideas Unlimited quilting store in Manhattan, and a woman encouraged her to take it up again.

“She was so gracious about it and so excited about it.”

Evans said when the store became All About Quilts, that owner encouraged her, too, and now she wants to pass that excitement on.

“There are some messages about quilting that I would like to be able to get out to people.”

First, she said she wants people to know quilting is worldwide. She said every culture has some sort of quilting for clothing and blankets.

Also, she said, “Anybody can have an appreciation for the art that is involved in quilts — because it’s not for the faint of heart to make a quilt from start to finish.”

There are different genres of quilting, and Evans said she likes and does them all.

Prices will vary depending on the service, but Evans said if she designs and makes a full quilt that takes three to four weeks to make, it could sell for $300 to $400 or more depending on how large or complex it is.

Evans said as she was contemplating whether to transform her word-of-mouth business into an actual business, she took a walk around a lake that inspired her both to take the leap and name the business White Crane Designs.

“I was kind of at a crossroads,” she said.

As she took that walk, though, she began communing with a white crane, though she acknowledged it may have been an egret instead.

Regardless, she and the bird watched each other, and Evans would approach it before it flew away just a bit. This continued to happen as she said they watched each other, but all of a sudden the bird took off and soared into the sky.

“I think I have my answer,” Evans said she thought to herself, “and I know what I’m going to call my business.”