Milestone blanket

As the saying goes, it never rains, it pours!  After loving my time at the South African National Quilt Festival my machine went to our local dealer to have the bobbin winder fixed and he suggested a service too, seeing that I almost have my machine for 2 years.

Machine returned, bobbin winder seemed to work okay again but that is about where my pleasures ended.

My DIL and her sis bought a milestone blanket for my pregnant daughters’ stork party.  They were rather disappointed when it got here and turned out to be nothing more than a printed polyester sheet.  So mother-in-law had to solve the problem.  Used a white percale (I hate this stuff) backing and wool batting and marked my grids, definitely not something I would ever do on a bed quilt, way too tedious.

I then decided to simply outline some of the printed pictures and keep it as simple as possible.  Surely the focus should be on the baby and the month the photo was taken in and not on the background quilting.

We also decided to stitch the baby’s name in the pale pink banner.  Easy to unpick and change should another girl happens!

This however all happened midst a myriad of problems with my machine, skipped stitches, horrible tension and leaving me beyond frustrated.  Some stitching was so bad; I redid it with my domestic sewing machine.  This needed to be done, so I pushed ahead.

Now sadly for my daughter but good timing to me, she ended up in the hospital with something causing painful swelling of the glands around the neck and facial area. Some days it seems as if doctors simply play guessing games.  One specialist said it was The Epstein-Barr virus with the second specialist differing from the first, thinking it was tick bite fever, so eventually, they got an internist to do more test and he diagnosed a spider bite. She had several bite marks on her head.  I guess spider got entangled in her hair and fought his way out. With her in hospital however, I could work and relax not fearing she might pop in any moment.

After this, I started another customer quilt but my machine problems continued and my local tech is not doing it for me, it’s his way or no way, even though other methods/ thread/ tension has worked perfectly for me in the past, he simply does not listen to any other than his own reason.  So off machine went to Johannesburg once more, seeing that all his methods didn’t work either. 

Ranting over, I think the girls were satisfied with the way I turned their flimsy into a blanket and we’ve had the Stork party yesterday, so I can now show this.