BluePip Designs

Welcome to this week's Quilt Block Summer Summary!  I got a little behind this week as I spent most of Memorial Day weekend outdoors with my family instead of alone in my sewing room.  But that's the point of Quilt Block Summer - relaxing and sewing when I can without pressure. Temperature Quilt 2018 These blocks are the easiest to make so of course I kept up with them.  I hit a couple of milestones this week.  First, I finished the eighth row in my quilt! Second, we hit 100 degrees on Memorial Day!  100!  That is so crazy for May in Minnesota!  The low on January 1st was -15 degrees, so we've had quite the range in the last 150 days.  I debated between using brown and black to signify this, but it's so hot in May I wanted to keep my options open for the really hot days in July and August.  It was nice to have a real spring day with lower temperatures yesterday. Harry Potter Bookcase Nothing to show here this week. ...

My goal for this month was to finish the My Small World quilt top I finished piecing in January of 2017, more than sixteen months ago. I started by pulling it out of the drawer - even the picture I posted with my original goal post was old.  After a good pressing, I got the quilt basted and sky quilted. That was the easy part.  Next, I started quilted the buildings below, switching my thread color to match or coordinate with each block.  Sometimes I could do several blocks in one pass and sometimes I only did part of a block with one color before having to break.  I prefer to bury my threads as I go along.  It makes the quilting take a little longer, but then when I'm done, I'm done.  The pins you can see in this picture are reminders to come back and quilt that spot. I also experimented with hand-quilting selected parts of the quilt.  I've only done this twice before and both times it was on very small wall hangings (my Moda Matchbox q...

Welcome to this week's Quilt Block Summer Summary!  So far, so good with staying on track. Temperature Quilt 2018 One block away from another full row!  The cardinal represents my grandmother.  My five-year-old picked the last two print fabrics for me. Harry Potter Bookcase "There was a lot more to magic, as Harry quickly found out, than waving your wand and saying a few funny words." - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 2018 Summer Sampler I love how this block looks rounded, especially when you rotate it ninety degrees!  I'm also trying to use the white as more of an accent color so that the blocks will stand out from the quarter-square triangle units in the final layout.  I may be limited by how much fabric I have, but I'll live dangerously as long as possible. Ricochet Quilt This week's block features Cut It Out in Navy from Rashida Coleman-Hale's Paper Cuts collection . Trinket Quilt The second block of this...

My Quilt Block Summer has begun!  I'm not going to lie - it was a bit of a rush starting four new quilts in a single week!  As of today, I'm done with preschool runs forever and I've got one kid on summer vacation, so it feels like summer here.  I'm hoping to keep these posts short and sweet and full of pictures, but for week one I'm going to ramble a little bit and explain each of the projects. Temperature Quilt 2018 My temperature quilt is a daily quilt that I've been working on since January to track the temperatures in our city (even if we are out of town, I use our home temperature in the quilt).  I'm 136 days in and still loving it!  I was thrilled to find an orange floral fabric in my stash to represent Mother's Day - the random stash builders from my Sew Sampler box have helped me so many times: Harry Potter Bookcase This is a quilt that has been on my "to-make" list for a long time.  With the exception of the ...

This pillow was a pattern that dropped in my inbox and instantly captivated me.  It looked like a fun, quick project, so I grabbed some solids and started right in. The letters are paper-pieced and went together quickly; the quilting took way longer.  I did straight-line quilting with my regular foot and stopped each time I hit a color so there were a lot of ends to bury.  I should have used my free-motion foot and just gone around the letters - lesson learned!.  This sweet pillow is going on the guest bed for now (if one of the kids doesn't nab it). Pattern is by Quiet Play and was a subscriber bonus to Make Modern Magazine (affiliate link) .

It's almost the middle of May.  The first pair of birthdays is done, we're running to various kid sporting events seven days a week (and some of those days have multiple sporting events on them), and we've got another pair of birthdays, a wedding, and a mini vacation coming up.  In other words, it's a typical spring.  So, of course the only logical thing to do when one has no time to sew is to go a little crazy and buy fabric for not one but THREE new quilts.  Of course it is. And now that the shopping high has gone down (and I'm waiting for my packages to arrive), I'm trying to work out in my head how I can have a fun summer with my kids, sew a little to keep my sanity, and still have a home that is reasonably clean and tidy.  And I think I have the solution: don't make a full quilt this summer.  Hear me out.  If I'm lucky, I'll have about a half hour to sew each morning before we get going, maybe a little bit more on the weekends.  So instead ...

This month, I'm hoping to spend a lot of time working on my Harry Potter quilt and starting my Summer Sampler 2018 , BUT I do have one big goal that I am going to link up: finish my My Small World Quilt!! I started piecing this in July 2016 and finished piecing it in January 2017.  Then I placed it in a drawer and left it there.  Out of sight, out of mind, right?  But it's time to bring it out of the darkness and into the light.  This is going to be a very large wall hanging and I'm planning on mostly machine quilting it, but doing a little bit of hand-quilting as well.  I've only done a tiny bit of hand-quilting before and I'm looking forward to trying it on a larger scale. Wish me luck!  I'm linking my goal up at Elm Street Quilts .