First Baby Quilt for the Blanket Ministry This Year and It Had to Have Pink

I've belong to the Blanket Ministry at my church for the past four years and am committed to making one baby quilt a month which by the end of 2016, I made a total of 45 baby quilts.  When the Blanket Ministry first started, we didn't have enough boy or gender neutral quilts, there were a lot of flowers and pink, so I volunteered to make the gender neutral and boy quilts.  At that time, it felt like a sacrifice on my part since I considered myself to be "Pink" deprived being a mother of two sons.  Last year I told the leader of the group that I needed to make a quilt with pink and with flowers and I finally did for my 36th quilt.  This past weekend, I made two tops and had one made from last year so I was ready to start quilting them so I can reach my quarterly goal of three baby quilts by the end of this month.  The first one I quilted, of course, had to be the one that had pink which was also the first top I made with my favorite pattern which I posted about in an earlier link (you can read about it here).

I usually hand sew the binding on my quilts but for baby quilts I like to sew down the binding by machine using my walking foot.  After I finished sewing the binding on this quilt, I was surprised to see all the skipped stitches there were--bad enough that I had to rip out all of the binding.  I didn't notice the stitches were skipping since I was so concentrated on making sure the stitching stayed on the binding.  This is the first time my Juki 2010Q has done this so according to the manual it was either my needle was bent or it was not inserted properly.  So I changed my needle, made sure it was inserted properly and rethreaded but the stitches were still skipping.  I ended up using an open toe foot which eliminated this problem but I didn't like how it was pushing up the binding while I was sewing.    I'm hoping I won't have this problem with the other two baby quilts I still have to finish.

Looking at the stash that I've put aside for these baby quilts, it looks like this may be the only pink one I will make for the year since I still have a lot left for gender neutral baby quilts which needs to be used up.  So out of the now 46 baby quilts made for the Blanket Ministry, only three of them had pink.  Maybe I'll have a chance to make another pink baby quilt--Grandbaby Mikulski will be arriving at the end of the month and the gender is unknown until the delivery.  I've been saving some really sweet fabrics and hoping that I'll get to use them.  If not, there's also the cute Monster fabric, which in my opinion, is so right for a boy.

My fabric fast is still continuing and I will be able to add more to my total since I just dropped off three quilts at the long arm quilter.  I just read on another quilter's blog that she fabric fasted for three months and finally bought fabric because she needed a certain solid fabric to finish her quilt.  I could very well make it to three months and when I do finally buy fabric it's going to be something I really want and I think it's going to involve some of the new Cotton + Steel fabrics --just love those whales.

Minus 100 Yard Challenged YTD Total:  -48.625 yards