BluePip Designs

Happy Halloween!  A bit later than normal because of the Bernie's Mittens Quilt-Along post (pattern on sale until midnight tonight!), but still an accurate picture of my month.  I spent all day today riding roller coasters and saying good-bye to our local amusement park until next May, and now I'm manning the candy dish while the kids are out trick-or-treating.  No homemade costumes this year, but they are still carrying the bags I made them years ago when they were toddlers!  Quilt Tally WIP List at beginning of month: 13 WIP List at end of month: 13 Untouched in 2021: 4 Active QAL Projects: 3 Kid Projects: 2 Quilts Finished Summer Scrap (June 2021) Sew Happy Banner (September 2021) - A fun mini quilt I made sewing along with the Fat Quarter Shop .  I reduced the scale of the pattern by half to make a cute banner.  It's hanging in my family room for now but will get moved to my sewing room soon! Q...

Welcome to Week 2 of the Bernie's Mittens Quilt-Along!  Today is the last day to get the Bernie's Mittens pattern on sale and help out a local food bank with your purchase.  This is our first week of sewing, so there's plenty of time to jump in and join us! Week 2 is the busiest sewing week of the QAL; we are making the most strips with the most pieces. My best tip for sewing the pieces together is to make sure your seam allowances are exactly a quarter-inch; there aren't very many spots that need to line up exactly in this quilt but the ones that do matter! The best way to assemble the Bernie's Mittens quilt is to divide each stripe into thirds.  I started with the center sections, piecing one gray rectangle to the top of each white square followed by a second gray rectangle to the bottom of the same white square. Next, I separated my black squares into two piles, those that needed to be sewn to white and those that needed to be sewn to pink, and ...

Welcome to Week One of the Bernie's Mittens Quilt-Along!  I'm so glad you decided to join us!   The pattern is still on sale in my pattern shop if you need a copy, and I'm donating $2 from the sale of each pattern to my local food bank through the end of October! Full disclosure, I am not normally a pre-cutter.  And if you feel the same way and plan on starting next week and cutting as you go, I completely understand.  I tend to get impatient halfway through the cutting stage and have to start sewing just to see how things are going to look.  I've never regretted pre-cutting a quilt, I just don't do it often!  But for this quilt-along, I buckled down and did it.  Everything is the same width, so it is less daunting than a pattern with completely different-sized pieces.  I started by ironing all of my fabrics and cutting them into long strips (the pattern tells you how many of each color to cut). After a quick loo...

Today I am sharing Summer Scrap, my summer quilting project.  I love a good quilt-along, and while this was a quilt-along of my own making I think it still qualifies!  I spent the entire summer working on this quilt - each day I added a single* plus sign and a few low volume rectangles.  Even when I didn't have time to sew, I'd still pop into my sewing room to pick out the fabric for that day's plus. * Full disclosure: Of course, some days I added more than one and some days I just didn't feel like it and skipped working on it entirely.  This was a low-stakes, low-stress project! The pattern is Modern Rail Fence, found in  Issue 40 of Make Modern Magazine   (affiliate link) .  My version is a little wider (extra pluses) and I pieced my border with single rail fence blocks.  This was an extremely fun quilt to put together.  Sometimes the pluses came from other projects I was working on, sometimes they came from my scrap bins, ...

How did you do with the  2021 version of 100 Days 100 Blocks ?  This year, I didn't participate in all 100 days; instead I made one of the brand-new bonus layout versions, named The Challenger . If you read my 100 Days recap post , you know that one of my favorite parts of the quilt-along is to pick a challenge for myself.  For this version, I was working with a limited set of fabric - a fat eighth bundle of selected fabrics from  Wonderland fabric by Rifle Paper Co and some coordinating fat quarters pulled from my stash.  I then chose Spotted in Royal as a background fabric because the color reminded me of Alice's dress.  I'm not a huge fan of sashing, so I decided to make each block "float" by including the background fabric at least once.  I'm very pleased with the overall effect! I knew I wasn't going to make all 100 blocks before I started, so I was able to chose which blocks worked best with my fabric.  I chose to alternate blocks tha...

I love fall - the changing leaves, wearing jeans and sweatshirts again, and my kids going back to school.  My youngest child turns nine on Friday and once his birthday is over, it's clear sailing to the holiday season.  I'm busy behind the scenes putting the final touches on my upcoming Zephyr quilt pattern (and planning a holiday version!), but I also really want to make another Bernie's Mittens quilt as a gift for a family member and would love to have you sew along with me. So today I'm happy to announce the fall Bernie's Mitten Quilt Along! To kick things off, the Bernie's Mittens pattern is on sale in my pattern shop, no coupon needed.  And $2 from the sale of each pattern until the end of October will be donated to my local food bank! Bernie's Mittens is a super-easy, beginner-friendly quilt pattern.  We'll be sewing the strips in reverse order because there are the most of stripe 3 - so if you get your c...