BluePip Designs

Do you ever see a quilt and just know that you have to make it?  That's what happened with the Rainbow I-Spy quilt from the Fussy Cutter's Club book !  I saw the picture and thought, "Hmm...I bet I could do that with my stash."  And as it turns out, I did (almost)! I spent most of December and the first week of January just cutting out charms, systematically going through my entire stash to find the ones that I needed.  I cheated just a little bit, asking for some of the colors I was short on (purple and green) in my quilt guild's Secret Santa exchange. Once I had all my charms cut out, I enlisted the help of my best randomizers: my kids!  They helped me sort the charms from darkest to lightest in each color group and we laid them out on the floor.  It turned out that two of the charms I'd cut didn't really play nice with the others and I was short a pink charm, but once I got over that hump all three of us were pretty excited. Anyone who

At our December meeting, my quilt guild asked for mini quilts to raffle off at a local quilt show. The proceeds go back to our guild to use for outreach, charity, and workshops.  I decided to use the Geometric Bunny pattern from Quiet Play .  I made one last year for a swap and it ended up in my Best Nine collage for 2017 so it seemed like a good bet!  This pattern sews up quickly.  It's paper-pieced and I pre-numbered the pieces from one to five, then gave each of my chosen fabrics a number.  That way when I was sewing I didn't have to think about what fabric went where - it was just grab and go!   Here's my finished bunny: I hope he finds a good home!

I really enjoyed making my September Squares mini-quilt last fall and I wanted to do something similar in 2018, but on a larger scale.  And then, like all the best things, the perfect solution just fell into my lap.  I was reading the newsletter that Sarah from Sarah Goer Quilts sent out last week and one of her links was to Colorful Om's Temperature Quilt 2018 Quilt Along .  I knew immediately that it was exactly what I was looking for! It took me a couple of days to decide exactly how I wanted to do it, but I finally came up with some guidelines for myself: 1. I decided to do square-in-a-square blocks, with the center square representing the high temperature for the day, and the outer square representing the low temperature. 2. I wanted to do this as a scrappy quilt from my stash. 3. The outer square is a solid.  I have a lot of solids left over from various projects and I tried to pick out the largest pieces that are the right color.  If I run out of a color, I'm goin

Another mashup! This time I am combining Elizabeth Hartman's Dwight the Deer pattern with The Fat Quarter Shop's Jelly Roll Check pattern . Dwight is the focal point of my quilt and I doubled him in size to make him really stand out.  I had a yard of background fabric from the Jelly Roll Check quilt kit, which was more than enough.  The antlers took up an entire fat quarter and the face was most of a half-yard cut of fabric. I was a little worried that his antlers would look too fat once they were doubled but luckily that wasn't the case. Next, it was onto the border, which is made from the Jelly Roll Check pattern.  The pattern as written resulted in a lot of unused fabric, so I just went for it and sewed together a giant blob, cutting on the bias to get as many squares as I possibly could!  This worked great, except for the row that I made an inch too narrow.  Ugh.  Next time I'll mark my cutting line on my ruler so it doesn't happen again.

Here I go with my One Quilty Goal for January - my Rainbow I-Spy quilt from the Fussy Cutter's Club Book !  I've been cutting squares for this over the last few weeks and I'm eager to sew it all together.  I still need a few more, but this seems like it should be smooth sailing in a busy month. I even bought the backing in one of those Christmas fabric sales so I'm all set. I can't wait to get started!  I'm linking up my goal here:

In 2017, I participated in All People Quilt UFO Challenge - basically I made a list of 12 UFOs and each month a number was randomly assigned to work on.  I liked having a list of projects on my wall and I did well at completing them: I finished six of the quilts and made progress on five more of them - apologies to the last one!  It's still a quilt I want to make!  All of them were in various stages of completion, from fabric being purchased to just needing to be quilted.  What I didn't really like was the random selection of the project to work on - I prefer to work on what strikes me as interesting at any one time.  I don't think I worked on a single quilt in the month it was "assigned" to be worked on. So for 2018, I stumbled upon Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal  link-up - set a goal for myself each month to finish.  I think this will suit me much better!  Since I did like having a list of my UFOs on the wall, I do still want a chart to hang o