Goodbye Green January, Hello Orange February

Aaaaaaand..... with the turning of a calendar page, we bid good riddance goodbye to another January.  The first month of the year is always cold and yucky, so it’s never been my favorite. But now February is here. Yes, it’s still cold, but the month is short and sweet and holds the promise of some warmer weather. And some of my favorite people were born in February. You know who you are! 

I’d like to recap what I spent my time creating in the studio during the long cold month of January. First we’ll start with the finishes for this week. Creature from the Green Lagoon is finished, and the vivid blue looks really nice with the greens (even if I do say so myself) The picture isn’t the greatest, however. I’m stuck taking pictures of quilts by partially pinning them to the design wall because it’s just too cold to go loiter outside. You can click on it to see the detail.

This snuggly quilt (filed under "Creature Comforts", LOL) finished at 44.5” x 54.5”. It will be a donation quilt for Quilts for Kids. Our next workshop is a scrap workshop, and I’ll be showing this to encourage the members to save and bring orphan blocks for us to make up into useful quilts. 

I also finished the quilt from squares cut by one of my Weight Watchers friends, Annette. These fabrics are at least 20, probably closer to 30, years old. The colors are very definitely from the nineties. But they were in lovely condition.

I quilted it with pink thread in a swirly flower design that I enjoy using when appropriate. This quilt came together so easily that it was worth the extra effort to give it a little something special.  

It finished at 45x58”, which is more of a youth size. It just seemed more appropriate for an older girl. This will go to Quilts for Kids, too. If they can’t use it, we can always pass it on to another charity. These quilts, plus the others I finished in January, have been added to my “2020 Quilts” tab just under the blog header. Six quilts in January - done! Here is the recap collage (plus one straggler):

Five of six January quilts

I couldn’t add the quilt picture below to the collage above because for some reason, my collage maker software isn’t always recognizing the new .HEIC suffix (instead of JPG). 

Apparently Apple, with the iOS-11 update (November 2019) has begun formatting their iPhone pictures in HEIC (or HEIF), which stands for High Efficiency Image Coding/Formatting. It’s supposed to be the new thing, but that’s according to Apple, who has been known to make grandiose claims before. There is free software available online to convert HEIC to JPG, but I’m not going to bother. All my images from November 2019 forward have been HEIC, and this was the first one that gave me trouble. As long as I can post them on my blog or print them out, then not being able to use a picture in a collage occasionally isn’t enough to make me voluntarily play with computers. Have any of you had any issues?  Sorry for that digression!

Back to sewing.... The Rainbow Scrap January color was green, and I laid waste to my light and bright green scraps, creating a total of 51 blocks, not counting those selvage circles that ended up in Creature or the scrap bucket. The selvage columns were counted as one, but there were 17 large half hexies made of selvages.

I'm linking up to Scrappy Saturday at So Scrappy. I have already sewn my orange selvages, but I’ll save those for my next post, which may or may not be next weekend (depending on internet reception next Saturday). So if I’m not here, just think of me sitting in the sun, drinking margaritas!