Challenges for February

I have now officially visited all 114 links to the finished January UFOs in the Patchwork Times UFO Challenge (and with dial-up internet, that was a challenge in itself! lol) I don't know if I'll have the stamina to do so every month, but it was nice to at least once visit all of my co-challengees. What a lot of gorgeous quilts and projects, and seeing so many things being accomplished is incredibly inspiring! (If you happened to miss my own January finish, you can find it here.)

Now it's on to February... and I'm having a bit of a slow start this month. Since finishing the baby quilt that I needed to do right off the bat, I've had a return of the insidious pinched nerve in my back that stopped me in my tracks a year and a half or so ago. I've gone to the chiropractor religiously since then, so I have no idea how I managed to aggravate it so badly, seemingly overnight. Could have something to do with the marathon stitching and quilting of January's UFO? Hard to say. But I'm feeling a little improvement day by day, so I hope I can get on with my remaining February projects very soon. Fortunately, both are relatively easy finishes!

February's pick for the UFO (UnFinished Objects) challenge is #10, Tim's Fleece Vest, not even a quilting UFO, but one of my sewing UFO's that I chose to fill in the missing numbers. (I still can't believe I had less than 12 unfinished quilts!)

While I haven't started working on this yet, I have given it some thought, and plan to go another route with it. When he picked out this pattern some time ago, he couldn't decide between black with yellow or yellow with black, so I bought fabric and zippers for both. I made the black with yellow right away...

...unfortunately, I haven't seen him wear it since I took this picture, so the yellow/black will probably not get much use either. I'm planning to combine a couple of patterns on this next one and make it a sweatshirt instead of a vest, possibly hooded? I'm hoping that'll go over a little better.

For the February GED (Get 'er Done) challenge, the pick was #3, the Papa Bear and Baby Bear panel. I did get a start on this one already and I have an idea of how I'll put at least one of these stuffed bears to use:

So... no quilting for me this month (aside from starting new projects, of course! lol) Considering the state of my back right now, I'd say I pretty much lucked out with the challenges. I'm off to the chiro again tomorrow. Maybe I'll get some relief and I can get back to work. Wish me luck!