Gloria and Ron have retired.

Dear friends,

We have some news, and we want you to hear it from us.

Gloria and Ron have retired. Saturday, September 26 was our last day.

We are simply ready. After twelve years of unlocking that door, it is time to go be Gloria and Ron for a while, and we would rather leave while we still love it than stay until we do not.

That does not make it easy to write this.

Glory Bee’s started the way most good things do, with somebody’s aunt teaching somebody to quilt. Gloria caught that bug young, it took hold for good at Quilt Odyssey, and one day she looked at Ron and said we should open a shop. He said yes. That is most of what you need to know about Ron.

What we did not understand back then is that the machines and the fabric were never really the business. You were.

The woman who came in shaking because she had never threaded a serger, and who was teaching her granddaughter by Christmas. The quilter who drove past two closer shops because she wanted to talk to somebody who actually sews. The people who came in for one spool of thread and stayed an hour. The ones who brought us tomatoes out of the garden. The ones who brought their finished quilts in to show us before they showed anybody else. The ones who handed us a machine that had been their mother’s and trusted us with it.

We got to watch beginners turn into teachers. We got to watch quilts come together on that longarm that will still be in families a hundred years from now. We got to watch a whole lot of you become friends with each other, right here, over a cutting table, because you happened to sign up for the same Saturday morning class.

That is what we will miss. Not the shop. You.

A few things you should know

• The shop is closed. Saturday, September 26 was our last day, and the store phone is no longer answered.
• Your machine warranties did not retire with us. They are through Brother, Elna and Janome, not through us, and they stay good. Any authorized dealer for your brand can carry on looking after your machine, and the manufacturer’s website will show you the ones nearest you.

Chuck is staying in service

To Ann, Debbie, Ruan, Wendy and Chuck

You made this shop what it was. Every kind thing a customer has ever said about Glory Bee’s was really about one of you. Thank you for taking care of our people like they were your own, on the busy days and the slow ones.

And to you

Thank you for twelve years.

Thank you for choosing a little shop on Belair Road when clicking a button would have been easier. Thank you for every class you signed up for, every machine you trusted us with, every project you carried in to show us, and every single time you walked through that door and said hello.

Keep sewing. Please. Make the thing you have been putting off. Cut into the good fabric, the piece you have been saving. Teach somebody younger than you.

We are not going far, and we are not going to stop quilting. We are just going to do it in our pajamas.

It has been the honor of our lives.