BluePip Designs

A full month of staying home is behind us.  I've never had any desire to homeschool my kids, but I'm happy to say we made it through and they might have even learned something!  As for me, I coped by starting new quilt projects and keeping up on my quilt-alongs.  A few of these are waiting for the finishing touches in my en route package . 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: 4 Kid Projects: 2 Quilts Finished (2) 2018 Summer Sampler (Started May 2018) Catitude Pillow (Started April 2020) * - Just a tiny bit of finishing work needed! Quilts Started (2) Wake Me Up SAL - the classic lines in this one just really appealed to me.  I haven't done anything like this in a while and it was fun to work with big pieces of fabric for once.  My stash didn't have quite enough dark pinks, so my slow package contains the last two, plus a piece of low volum...

My April goal should have been pretty easy to complete, but as with most things during the quarantine it was overly optimistic.  It wasn't very hard to piece the top out of my stash; Or have some fun quilting the cats; Even even making a giant (19x19) pillow form out of an ancient piece of yardage and filling it with squares of batting scraps was pretty easy (I cut them into one inch squares [eyeballed, not measured] and then pack them in). But it's still not technically done.  I couldn't find any fabric in my stash that I liked well enough to be the back.  For a mini quilt, I would have pieced something together and called it good, but since it's a pillow I wanted it to coordinate.  So on April 11th, I hopped online and bought some more of the grape grunge dots to have a cohesive finish.  As of today (April 29th) I'm still waiting for that package to arrive.  And once it does arrive, it's going to have to sit for a few days before I ...

Two years ago I launched my Quilt Block Summer event , and today I am sharing the final quilt that I started as part of that program*: Summer Road Trip .  I ended February with the quilt basted and hit the ground running with it in March .  Then everything fell apart and I just kept going - I didn't even plug my iron in again until March 15th and that was only to make the binding for my Rocket quilt . So, without further ado, my finished 2018 Summer Sampler quilt!! Since quilt photography isn't "essential" the picture was just taken in my backyard.  It's not fancy, but it will definitely remind me of the world at the time I finished it.  Each block is custom quilted and my mantra for this quilt was "less is more" - make it pretty without over-doing it.  I'd quilt and quilt until I had about two dozen hanging threads, then take a break and visit with my family and bury them all.  I didn't know how I was going to quilt each block when I s...

I'm currently in the middle of a post-big project slump.  I spent all of March working on my Summer Sampler project (just two feet of hand-binding to go, it's happening tonight!), then I caught up on my QAL blocks .  Now that I have more of a choice (aka no secret sewing!) of what to work on I'm having trouble committing to my next big thing.  I should probably sew myself up a mask or two for my next trip to the grocery store, but instead I decided to start on a project I saw in  Make Modern Issue 32 :  the Catitude pillow (affiliate link) . These three cats went together in about an hour and a half, so my goal is to completely finish the whole project.  My new normal includes distance learning for three kids so that's going to be an interesting journey as we sort all that out, but I'll need my sewing time to keep my sanity. I'm linking up my goal with Elm Street Quilts .

Pen and Paper Patterns released four brand-new holiday patterns today and I am sharing my tester version of her Firecracker pattern  (all are available as printed patterns too)!  This is technically a 4th of July quilt, but I used springy Easter colors and then photographed it on a morning with a light dusting of snow (it all melted about a half hour after my son helped me take this).  Crazy, yes, but somehow appropriate for this weird Twilight Zone life we are all living right now. This quilt has a lot of fun fabrics in it - the rockets are made from some long-stashed original release fabrics:  Grunge Dots  by BasicGrey and ombre fabric by  V and Co .  The fuses are made from  Spectrastic  and the explosions are a mix of Speckled from Ruby Star and metallics scraps.  Finally, the background is the fantastic  Dreamweaver Spirograph fabric  in teal - it just reminded me of fireworks in the sky. I liked the Spir...