Plans for old Lind church
PJ Jacobsen, of Crazy Quilter, demonstrates how her quilting machine works. Her business is inside the former Methodist Church in Lind. She and her husband bought the church on eBay.
LIND - It was a chance surf on the internet that changed the lives of P.J. Jacobson and her husband Jake.
Jake Jacobson was poking around the eBay site, P.J. said, and he found something unusual for sale in Lind. The Methodist Church congregation had dwindled down to the point where they couldn't support the church any longer, and it was forced to close. It had been standing empty for four years.
"They finally put it on eBay," P.J. said, and Jake Jacobson, playing on his computer in Seattle, saw it. "My husband always wanted to do something crazy," she said, and buying an old church in a tiny town in eastern Washington seemed like an excellent idea.
P.J. was attending a meeting in Moses Lake, and tacked on the extra miles to Lind to check out the building, she said. "That was on a Sunday, and the bidding was on Monday." The Jacobsons had the highest bid, although it was under the church's minimum, and at the end of the day they owned the old Methodist Church.
P.J. Jacobson made the building the headquarters for her business, Birth and Baby, designed for newborns and nursing mothers. She also started Crazy Quilters her quilt business. And for seven years the church has been the Jacobson home.
P.J. said she had a "huge" space next to a mall in Seattle, and a premium spot required premium rent. She was paying about $5,000 per month, "and that was an awful lot of bras to sell." When she analyzed her business, she found that about 75 percent of it was internet-based, she said. The store was closed for four days; "no one knew we had moved," she said.
"We kind of lived out of our camper" for a while, Jacobson said. The building had been empty for years and the plumbing and electrical wiring reflected it. The Jacobsons upgraded the utilities, doing most of the work themselves.
The work is still underway, because Jake Jacobson still has a job in Seattle. "We have our hot dates Friday nights at Lowe's and Home Depot," she said. "We are having fun."
It's also because P.J. has some ambitious plans for her business, she said, envisioning a retreat for quilters who just want to get away.
The quilting is an offshoot of Jacobson's lifelong interest in fabric, design and clothing construction. She taught her six children to sew and made most of their clothes for many years, she said.
Quilting is a stress reliever. "It's addicting. You can look, and touch and feel - that's a whole evening's entertainment in itself."
Sewing clothes, making drapes and pillow covers, making quilts - it's all fun. "Fun and relaxing - and practical too," she said. She liked the idea of a quilt shop; she wanted the whole experience, selling fabric and notions, quilting the finished products, providing quilting and sewing lessons.
Crazy Quilters sells fabrics off the bolt and smaller pieces she's picked up along the way. "I'm calling them my fabric gems," she said, and finding those gems that work together to make a quilt is half the fun, she said. The store is a "scrappy quilters' haven," she said.
Crazy Quilters also has a quilting machine; Jacobson said she will do the quilting but she encourages her customers to learn for themselves as well. She asks customers to include a half-yard or so on the quilt for practice."After you've practiced that much, you're ready to quilt. It's not that scary."
But the church is not big enough for two businesses. Jacobson has purchased a building in downtown Lind, and is moving Birth and Baby to the revamped space. The old downtown thrift store also will include a commercial kitchen, to be shared between Jacobson and a local caterer. A separate commercial kitchen was the only way she could provide meals to quilting retreat customers, she said.
The quilting store will expand to fill the church's sanctuary, and portions of the building are being remodeled to accommodate the quilting retreat classes.
There's already a hot tub and sauna set up, and one portion of the upstairs is being remodeled into a suite with bedrooms and a sitting room. The sauna-hot tub area also will have exercise equipment, and a masseuse will be available, she said.
The rebuilding has taken a little longer than first anticipated; Jake is working out of town and P.J. is running two businesses. Actually she has a third business. P.J. is a certified midwife, and at the moment the town's only active EMT. She's following in the footsteps of her mother, who was working as a midwife in Afghanistan when she was born. Her father was an English teacher, she said.
Her sister is working as a midwife in Kabul, Afghanistan and P.J. said one of her goals is to spend time working there also.