I don’t remember when I started the Safari Quilt. I can imagine it may have been 1990 because that is when my oldest child Simon started school.

Simon used to wear shirts. Oh, he had t-shirts too but because his Nana sewed him shirts, he mostly wore those. One, in particular, was really quite lovely. She had made the shirt from safari-themed fabric and heroes a zebra on the back of the shirt. Simon wore this shirt all the time. It was a super-great shirt - and then, like all children, he grew out of his shirt.

I was very new to quilting but thought I would use this shirt in a quilt for him. His father also happened to have a zebra shirt, so I decided to shop for fabrics that would pad out the safari theme and set about to make a quilt for Simon.

This quilt has taken me a very long time.

It’s really funny to me how little things can be the things that stall my projects. The obstacles might be lack of resources or skills that keep me stuck until I remove that obstacle from my path. Sometimes they’re boulder-sized obstacles, but mostly I can now see they are little pebbles that really don’t take that much effort to move if I really think about it.

The pebble in question was that my quilting hoop snapped. Yes, I had started hand-quilting this quilt and was about halfway done when the quilting hoop snapped. I couldn’t find a replacement, and meanwhile, my fingertip-calluses smoothed over so when I did finally get my tools right, it was once again very painful to hand quilt the stitches.

These aren’t excuses; they are the serious of tiny pebbles that got in my way.

The pebble I kicked from my path was the idea I had to complete hand stitching the quilt.

The idea that I had to hand quilt the Safari quilt stalled me for decades. Just changing that thought was all I needed to do to kick start this quilt again. I unpicked all the hand-quilting I had done, loaded the top onto the long arm, and just quilted the darn thing.

The quilt is very wonky. It’s not straight as my lack of experience when I started the quilt shows but that didn't stop me. That perfectionism pebble is a really crippling one for most of us. I created binding from the trimmed edges of the quilt because the pebble of not-enough-of-the-right-fabric is another one I didn’t need. And sewed a label over a particularly torn section of the backing, and signed the quilt.

Now that my son is a grown, married man with a child of his own, I am finally able to gift him the quilt I started when he was just starting school. And another lesson in removing the obstacles isn’t always a monumental task, but often just a slight shift in mindset.

Thank you to @melissaquilts for taking such lovely photos of her husband Simon’s quilt.

Thank you also to Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash and Hayden Walker also on Unsplash for providing free-to-download photos I could use.