BluePip Designs

I am almost done with a year-long swap; each month we get a new partner to send a little something to.  This month, I got a partner who loves Cotton+Steel fabric and photography.  I've been obsessed with Polaroid blocks for a long time, but never actually made anything with them so I decided it was a great time to go digging in my C+S scrap box and get making! I ended up with six Polaroid blocks, some with older prints and some with newer prints. Next up was a camera block I've been wanting to make for a long time, from Lori Holt's Spelling Bee book .  I think the sparkly fabric makes the perfect lens! And then I just had to put it together.  I had an idea in my head and it came out pretty close to what I imagined!  I added a little fancy quilting to dress it up and I had just enough of the Gamaguchi fabric to bind it! The only non-Cotton and Steel fabric in the whole thing is the plain white Kona I used in the Polaroid blocks.  I hop...

I hinted that I was starting another Cobblestone quilt and here it is! This time I borrowed my mother-in-law's 16.5 inch square ruler, which made the cutting go even faster. I also rotated all my fat quarters 90 degrees from the diagrams in the pattern, which led to larger left-over pieces. Just like last time it was a fun puzzle to get all the pieces arranged so like colors and patterns didn't touch.  But once I got it done, it sewed up quickly: The quilting was even faster - I just used a simple meander all over the top: The back is a teal and navy herringbone that I picked up on sale.  It calms down the front just enough and the pink thread disappears nicely: I made my binding and used my Binding Baby to guide it while I sewed it on. This is one of my favorite sewing notions! She reminds me of a giant Little People person, the fun kind we had in the 80s, not the weird ones they make now. When I'm not using her, she's a great shelf decoration...

The past couple of weeks have been taken up with First Lego League (the team I coached won at regionals!), cross-stitching (because I'm so tired from all the FLL stuff I just want to crash on the couch), and sewing a second Cobblestone quilt , which is currently stuck in hand-binding limbo (because I keep choosing to cross-stitch instead!). Out of necessity, I did make it down into my sewing room to sew up a quick bow-tie for my son's wax museum costume.  All the fourth graders dress up as historical figures and give "recorded" speeches about themselves.  My son was Thomas Edison and I just know that if Edison was alive today his kids or grandkids would give him a crazy lightbulb novelty bowtie: While I was down there, I did get sucked into a few easy quilt blocks.  I put together a few of the blocks for the Magnolia Mystery Quilt - I'm loving these cute little flowers and really hope they are put into the final quilt on-point.  And if not on-point, I...

We're into November now and my mind has turned to Christmas!  I am hoping to make several Christmas gifts this year: two quilts, a table runner, a pillow, and maybe a couple of small bags.  Since the Gypsy Wife quilt is just for fun (and I am still a bit bored with picking out all the colors) I've decided to get it to a place that I'm mostly happy with and then set it aside for a while while I work on something new. So I made a few filler blocks: And then got the entire top left and a bunch of the bottom left sewn together: I suppose in a perfect world, I would have finished the bottom middle too so that that was all one piece under the sloth and they could be joined, but as you can see in the bottom right corner I've already moved on to another project and I needed the floor space to lay it out.  I'm looking forward to coming back to this one later with a fresh eye - I'm sure it'll go together quickly then!

In August, my quilt guild had a local graphic designer come and speak to us about her design process.  One of the things that immediately struck me was a personal project that she did charting the clothing she wore over the course of a month.  I immediately decided to do a similar thing with my fabric.  So in September, I cut out a 1.5" square of every single fabric I used and threw it in a bin.  I also cut two pieces that were 1.5"x3.5" to represent the two bindings I sewed on and one piece that was 3.5"x3.5" to represent the back of a quilt that I quilted. Once the month was over they sat for a little bit until I finally sewed them together into a blob, then added some fun quilting to give it a lot of personality: The quilting makes a grid through the squares, with swirls at the ends.  I used lots of different thread colors in whatever felt right - there's no pattern and I may have used up a few bobbins in the process (as well as buried a ton of en...