BluePip Designs

Happy Birthday to the all the Leap Day Babies!   I have to lead with that since I have a special one in my life!  Welcome to my monthly recap as an incentive to stay on track for my 2020 quilt goals .  As expected, my February list is far less impressive than January's was, but I still got a lot done. Goal #1: Get my WIP List Under 10 WIP List at beginning of month: 16 WIP List at end of month: 17 Untouched in 2020: 8 Active QAL Projects: 3 Kid Projects: 2 Quilts Finished None, but I expected that. Quilts Started More secret sewing this month - I made a whole top and sent it off to be quilted.  I can tell you it's full of grunge dots and sparkle and uses my Almost No-Waste Flying Geese method ! Quilt Progress (5 WIPs touched) Sunshine blocks are finished!  19 of them have been sent in to be replaced with other maker's blocks and the 20th (pictured below) is staying here with me as the start of my finished quilt! The Pandas are together...

My big goal for February was to finally assemble my panda top!  I pulled out the stack of blocks that hadn't been touched in 18 months and had my kids sort them out.   I quickly that realized Plan A (as described in my goal post) wasn't going to work. Some the blocks had pluses in them and the whole thing was already pretty busy. I decided to simplify and move onto Plan B, a simple 7x9 layout using the two yards of Spectrastatic in Tar that I bought recently without a plan for.  I'm a sucker for a good blender and this is my newest favorite.  The gray and black combo meant it matched everything without being distracting. But after I'd cut all the horizontal sashing and sewed it to the top of each row, I decided that this wasn't going to work either.  Traditional grids aren't my favorite and I feel like I've fallen back on this a lot recently just because it's easy.  So I decided to off-set the blocks and immediately felt much better. This...

Hello!  Today I am sharing the latest shortcut quilt from The Fat Quarter Shop: The Jolly Bar Bakewell Quilt !  A jolly bar is a pre-cut that measures 5x10 inches, halfway between a charm pack and a layer cake.  This pattern is very adaptable - each jolly bar piece is enough for 1.5 blocks, meaning you could also make the pattern from two sets of charm squares.  If you wanted a bigger quilt, a jelly roll or layer cake would give you three times as many blocks.  I love all the interesting shapes that the solid fabric makes on this quilt.  Only the large squares need to match up perfectly so it's a very forgiving pattern if you are new to quilting! This quilt is made up of 20 blocks and true to its promise, it went together very quickly - I had the top pieced, basted, and quilted in under a week.  I'm not a big border fan and I don't need a baby quilt right now, so I left the borders off and am calling it a doll quilt for a lucky little birthday gi...

And what a trip it's been!  It took me one year and two quilt-alongs to finish this quilt - a literal trip around the sun.  I started with Angie at Gnome Angel and finished with Alli at Woodberry Way . I kept mine on the small size - 16 blocks made entirely from my own scraps.  I thought about adding another row, but liked all the symmetry formed by my 4x4 grid and decided to leave it like this.  Every block has a red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple stripe in a random order, but arranged so that there are purple diamonds in the quilt.  I finished it off with a purple binding. The owls on the back were originally purchased for my Modern Fans quilt , but I didn't like the purple on the owl tummies for that.  It does, however, match this quilt perfectly, making it a 100% free quilt!  Even more exciting, the grid formed on the front of the quilt let me orange peel (my favorite FMQ motif) without marking anything! After my threa...

I'm focusing my monthly goals in 2020 on finishing up my old WIPs.  I'm not doing them in any particular order, just whatever I feel like working on when I write the blog post with my goal.  I finished two WIPs in January so I'm off to a good start! Some of you may recall my  Quilt Block Summer  plan of 2018 - focus on making quilt blocks only, sneaking in small amounts of time every day to sew and not worrying about big finishes when the kids were out of school.  I started five quilts at almost exactly the same time and threw in one older project just to round out the craziness.  I've since finished three of them ( Trinket , Ricochet , and the Blue/Green Sampler ) and this month I'm turning my attention to two more. The 2018 Summer Sampler was my completed goal for December and I have since found a backing fabric that I love.  I'm planning on getting it basted and putting in some foundation quilted lines.  If I'm lucky, that will give me som...