BluePip Designs

The list for March looks short, but I was busy!  I made big progress on fewer projects.  Two of my quilt-along quilts are now finished tops and hopefully one more will be a top by the end of the weekend.  I didn't sew a Harry Potter block or assemble a postage stamp row, but with all those tops assembled there will be plenty of time to catch up in April.  My favorite part of the month was the ability to take outdoor photos again, even if I was fighting the wind most of the time! Quilt Tally WIP List at beginning of month: 14 WIP List at end of month: 12 Untouched in 2022: 5 Active QAL Projects: 3 Quilts Finished Desert Cove (February 2022) Meeple Mini Quilt (February 2022) Quilts Started None. Quilt Progress (5 WIPs touched) Blue Zephyr - My quilt-along Zephyr has reached the assembly stage; I've got all my rails made and I'm ready to put it all together! One, Two, Tree - Double duty on this one! First, I pieced all my tree scraps into an abbrevi...

It's time to move onto our smaller scraps!  This part goes much faster because you only have to make two rails from each scrap.  Take the number of half scrap sets needed and divide by two; that's the number of half scrap sets you need to sew this week.  Next week you'll be sewing the remainder of the half scrap sets as well as any quarter scrap sets your layout requires. The only tricky thing about sewing the half scrap sets is sewing them out of directional fabric.  Cut one of your background fabric squares in half diagonally, then use as a template for cutting your colorful triangles - the diagonals need to go in opposite directions. Place the background fabric triangles on your scrap fabric so one diagonal runs left-to-right and the other runs right-to-left, then cut the scrap along the diagonal of the triangle.  The rectangle pieces also need to be cut in the opposite directions so everything lines up when the rails are sewn together. Then you can s...

Hello!  I'm back again after a week off from blogging (but not sewing!).  I hope everyone has been enjoying sewing their full scrap sets together.  I got through all my "almost" fat quarters of blue and managed to use 11 of them up completely!  I was not real strict with what was "light" and what was "dark" - they are sorted in the photo below but some of them really could go either way. I was more choosy with my purple rails, trying to pick out purples that read more blue.  I also debated as to whether or not I actually wanted to make the brown rails.  The only solution, of course, was to make one set of brown blocks and then lay them out with the blue blocks.  After seeing them together, I knew they belonged (and yes, that's the brown fabric from the original  Bernie's Mittens quilt !) I'm enjoying watching everyone's rails come together on Instagram.  My mother-in-law is sewing along as well, and she has her whole top completed!...

 Good morning!  Today I am sharing my Desert Cove baby quilt! Desert Cove is my first non-mini quilt "start-to-finish" 2022 project; almost all of my sewing so far this year has been long-term projects and quilt-alongs so nothing is getting finished!  This is a brand-new pattern, and while there was a quilt-along, I basically just started sewing it together and didn't stop.  I used a junior jelly roll from my stash, along with a few stray jolly bars to fill in after I made a cutting error and didn't have enough of the jelly roll to finish the entire top.  The only change I made from the written pattern was to add a border around the outside - I'm not normally a border person but this quilt seemed to be asking for one. I have an informal year-long goal to not make any new scraps, so the mis-cut jelly roll pieces got turned into a piano-key stripe for the back of my quilt.  Anything left over after that was cut into 2" squares for my postage stamp project . ...

Welcome! Who is ready to sew at last?  Me!!   Last week's post went over cutting both your background and feature fabrics and now we are going to start putting together our rails! This isn't a step-by-step tutorial; instead it's just some tips and tricks to help you out. We are working with the full scrap sets this week, which means each scrap is going to make four rails, or one complete pinwheel.  There are two questions to consider: how many scraps should I be sewing into rails and how do I decide which scraps to sew with this week? How many scraps should I sew into rails each week?   The quilt-along is allowing three weeks for sewing the full scrap sets, so roughly one-third of the needed scraps each week: Baby/Throw: 4 this week; 3 each of the next two weeks Twin: 12 each week Queen: 8 each week King: 12 this week; 10 each of the next two weeks How do I decide the order of scraps to sew each week?   This is c...