BluePip Designs

As I've mentioned before , one of the things I like to do at the beginning of each year is finish up all the quilts from the previous year's quilt alongs.  I love doing quilt alongs, but since they are done in bits and pieces, sometimes I don't get to the final assembly as quickly as I do with a linear quilt project. Enter the Release the Kraken quilt top.  I mostly kept up with the blocks in the correct month, but there were bonus patterns released each month as well.  For example, in July I made the optional crescent moon pattern instead of the log cabin moon that was in the original design.  No big deal, except that I wanted to make one of my pinwheel star blocks fit inside of the crescent.  So at the end of July I had this, which was actually two pieces. And then the poor thing just sat.  The pinwheel star wasn't released until December, when I was busy doing my Christmas sewing (ahem, Dwight B Plaid ) so I didn't get around to sewing it ri...

Sometimes the exact right quilt pattern falls into your lap at the exact right time.  I needed a quilt for a baby shower and nothing I came up with felt quite right.  I considered gifting the Rainbow I-Spy quilt , but it's a favorite at our house right now and I didn't want to part with it.  Then I got an email.  An email with a bonus pattern from Make Modern Magazine , the Geo Plus quilt   (affiliate links) .  I knew it was the right one as soon as I saw it, a fact that was confirmed when I saw that it was written as a baby-sized quilt! My friend and her husband are both huge college sports fans - their "save the date" and baby announcement cards both featured their alma maters!  Luckily the two schools, Michigan and Notre Dame, have a similar color scheme so I decided to use that as the theme for my quilt. I bought Kona Storm for the background color and then pulled every single yellow that I have, ranging from light to brigh...

Today I'm sharing the newest shortcut quilt from the Fat Quarter Shop: Jelly Roll Ripples .  I fell in love with the Palm Canyon collection the first time I saw it, so it was easy to pick the fabric for this quilt.  The Fat Quarter Shop even suggested coordinating solids for the collection so it was easy to pick one of those as well - Kona Ultra Marine .  Finally, I picked Widescreen in Geranium by Carolyn Friedlander to go on the back because it reminded me of the background of the palm tree fabrics in collection. This is a jelly roll pattern so the cutting goes very quickly.  I've never made a log cabin block before, but I pieced them in pairs so I could chain piece all the parts and they went together quickly as well.  The biggest problem I had was letting go of directionality - normally I try very hard to make all pieces go in the same direction, but with a jelly roll you don't have that freedom.  In the bird fabric below, I used some of the e...

The first four rows of my temperature quilt are done!  Yesterday marked the 72nd day of the year, meaning we are 20% of the way through 2018.  Making a quilt like this does seem to make the days go by faster, but I look forward to making a new block each morning. The most exciting block is the one with my first green outer square, a day where the low temperature was only 34 degrees.  I cannot wait until the first little bit of yellow pops up to let us know spring is here! And here are the first four rows all together:

Every year, Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs hosts a mystery quilt quilt-along .  I made her 2015 quilt and regretted not making her 2016 quilt, so I was very excited to try my hand at the 2017 version, the Magnolia Mystery Quilt.  I decided to go with a Christmas theme and use up some of the fabrics from my holiday stash. Cheryl does a great job of laying out the requirements for the quilt, letting you know how much of each color you'll need and which fabrics touch each other.  I decided to use red as my background with a light green, dark scrappy green, and red on white print.  September started off with a lot of half-square triangles. October was a little more intense: half-flying geese blocks!  Flying geese are my nemesis, but I used them as leaders and enders, trimming as I went along, so it didn't seem like as much work.  This is where the mystery part of the quilt comes in handy - had I just looked at this pattern I probably wouldn't have ma...

I'm working on some secret sewing at the moment so I'm going to keep my March goal simple: I want to finish my Release the Kraken quilt top.  This was a block-of-the-month quilt put together by Quarter Inch of Quirk and I kept up right until the end, except for December.  It was one of those projects where I wished I had the next month's pattern as soon as I finished the previous month's, and I'm not really sure why I haven't gotten back to it. Not only do I have most of the months done, I even have them assembled.  Here's the bottom two-thirds of the quilt: And here's the moon for the top section: I just need to make a handful of stars and then it's a finished top! Linking up at Elm Creek Quilts for One Monthly Goal.