Calendar Quilt - January Finished!

Well, I got the chance to work on my Calendar Quilt Challenge! As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I got a surprise visit from my daughter and son-in-law and I "talked them into" leaving my 18 month old granddaughter with me while they went out for a while. So Elsie and I had fun picking strips to update my Calendar quilt. She is quite accomplished at picking fabric strips out of a basket and putting them back in ~ I see a little quilter in the making. Sometimes I just need this kind of surprise diversion to make me slow down and just enjoy ~ even though I got nothing done on my "to do" list, it was a great way to spend the afternoon! :)

I wasn't able to do anything but the planning while Elsie was here, but later I went back and did the stitching of the strips we had layed out together. This next picture is my January section finished with all 31 days. I'm randomly varying the width of my strips, so I'm not sure how long each monthly section will finish. I'll try to keep them all similar though. (I had appliqued the snowflake to represent January and I'm machine embroidering on special days throughout).

The next picture is my friend and coworker Mary Nielsen's January Calendar section all finished. Mary did little appliques on hers for significant days. She did little socks on days when she had finished knitting a sock, and a little snowman on a snow day we had ~ How cute is that!

This is the start of my February section. I had to start the month with some Football fabric for the Superbowl of course. I won Pat Sloan's drawing for the Sew Along block this month and she sent me an envelope of Arabella fabric, so I've included that in there! We had a beautiful weather weekend here in Maryland, so I got out and worked in the garden, thus the leafy flower fabric strip. And the rest of the fabric strips are projects that I was working on at the time like our Jo Morton Club project and my Baltimore Album block for the month, so it's a very eclectic grouping! This will be quite an interesting quilt when it's finished!

Thanks to Elsie's visit, I have strips all picked out through the 22nd of February. Why the 22nd you ask? Well I knew I'd be working with orange for Pat's OP Challenge that runs from Feb. 20 - 22 (see the button link on my sidebar for info and join us for that Virtual Retreat weekend). So Elsie helped me pick out some orange strips and and we worked back from there, now I'm all ready to sew more strips on as the days go by. Send me a picture of your Calendar Quilt, and also periodically check out the Calendar Quilt button on my sidebar to see how other very creative ladies are tackling this challenge!

Enjoy the day!
~ Dawn