BluePip Designs

The name of the game right now is "quick sewing" - I've given up most of my early morning sewing time in favor of bike rides before the day gets too hot, so most of my sewing has been in tiny chunks. Goal #1: Get my WIP List Under 10 WIP List at beginning of month: 17 WIP List at end of month: 17 Untouched in 2020: 4 Active QAL Projects: 2 Kid Projects: 2 Quilts Finished Wake Me Up, Watermelon (started April 2020) Panda Love (Pandamonium) (started July 2018) Block Battle Mini (started April 2020) Quilts Started (2) I started two scrappy quilts this month, both focused on large-scale stash busting!  I'm calling them  Blueberry Jam and Plaidish .  Both are intended to be quick finishes, not long-term residents of the WIP list (a girl can dream!).  I generally alternate cutting and piecing when I only have a short time to sew, but they also work as leaders and enders. You may be wondering "How is your WIP list still at 17 if you finished three quilts ...

One of my unofficial goals this year was to use my stash.  I make a lot of scrappy projects, but most of them just use tiny bits - I grab a 2.5" square from this fat quarter, then a 3.5" square from that one, oh, and maybe a 1.5" by 2.5" rectangle over here.  My fat quarter boxes are overflowing and let's face it, some of the fabrics in them have been around forever and are just feeling a little stale. I've been working hard ( Forgotten Fat Quarter , Watermelon Quilt ) at using up stash, but there's always more to get through.  Here are some of the recent projects I've undertaken to make room for new fabrics! First, Blueberry Jam. This is a pattern called  Peanut Butter Pinwheels  that I won earlier this year.  I've been using blues in my leaders and enders quilt, but two 2.5" squares doesn't make much of a dent.  So I'm grabbing all the cuts that are less than a fat eighth and cutting them into the squares for this.  The blocks are ...

Pandamonium is finished!  This one is subtitled "Panda Love" because everyone who sees it tells me how much they love the pandas!  I started with a basic color palette inspired by the panda fabric itself (shown in the lower righthand corner block) and the rest is scrappy around that, using a tally mark system to balance the colors in the quilt.  The sashing is Spectrastatic in Lunar , my new favorite blender, and was purchased over a year after the blocks were finished. Finishing this top was my successful February goal and you can read more about the layout in that post.  When I came back to it, I had a happy surprise: I knew that I had bought the hexagon panda fabric to back the quilt in, but completely forgot that I had bought an equal amount of yardage of a hexagon neutral from the same collection.  That simplified making my back - I no longer had to piece an entire center strip together.  I settled for a single stripe to show off my color palet...

My Wake Me Up, Watermelon quilt is finished!  In a pre-COVID world, I totally would have brought it into Costco and thrown it over all the giant watermelon pallets for that perfect picture, but instead I brought one watermelon home and staged this cute picture. I don't think my family has ever been so excited for me to finish binding a quilt - I don't go grocery shopping all that often anymore so I bought the watermelon a few days before I was ready to take the pictures (it was good motivation!).  We also found out it's a lot harder than you'd think to get that perfect "bite picture". This quilt follows the Wake Me Up pattern , and was made during a quilt-along in April.  Except for piecing one of the white squares (I didn't have enough of the bear fabric), I faithfully followed the pattern.  I had to buy two more pink fabrics to fit my color scheme, but other than that it was completely from stash! I experimented a little with this one a...

Last month was all about touching old projects and making small bits of progress.  This month I want to make a big impact on my sewing room and WIP list by actually finishing things!  To that end, I have a mini goal and an official goal. My mini goal is to sew together all of the Sunshine blocks that I received in a swap earlier this year.  I have a plan of I want to do, I just need to take the time to put it together.  It involves sashing and cornerstones, which aren't my favorite things but I think in this quilt it will be worth the effort! My official goal goes back a little further, to a project that was sewn in 2018 and was a successful goal back in February : finish the panda quilt!  I had hoped that finishing the top would inspire me to quickly finish the whole thing, but it has fallen by the wayside and needs a little boost. I'm already on track to have one finished quilt this month (Wake Me Up, Watermelon is in the hand-binding stage),...