BluePip Designs

Another quilty year is done!  All I want to say up here is THANK YOU!  Thank you for reading my blog, admiring my projects, and buying my patterns.  Your support means so much to me! Quilt Tally WIP List at beginning of month: 11 WIP List at end of month: 12 Untouched in 2023: 3 Active QAL Projects: 1 Quilts Finished Scrap Cabinet (March 2023) Quilts Started I started two projects this month.  First, the scrappy throw-sized version of Pebbled Prairie.  It's such a fun pattern to make and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you soon.  Second, my Advent calendar project from Sugaridoo .  I have all of the piecing done, but there's appliqué involved and I'm very slowly working on the blanket stitching around the edges of those pieces.  Once that part is done, it should be an easy peasy finish.  The pattern calls for making this guy into a pillow, but I'm not really a pillow person so I'll probably just stick with a mini quilt. Quilt

The only way I can think of to open this post is with an image of my favorite finish from 2023, my postage stamp quilt ! From a distance it's a bunch of multi-colored squares, but up close there is plenty of fussy-cutting and interesting things to look at.  It's backed in flannel so it's super warm and cuddly! Now that I've lured you in with a pretty quilt, let's take a look at the official goals that I set at the end of 2022 : 1. Write three new patterns.  Interesting that I said "write" and not "publish" because that means I got closer to my goal than I realized.  I started off the year with a lot of ideas and drive, but I'm having trouble turning pattern writing into a job and not just a hobby.  It gets pushed to the back burner by my part-time job and household responsibilities.   A short list of the things I like best about pattern designing: Coming up with the designs Figuring out the

 Today I am sharing the scrappiest of finishes with you: my rainbow Scrap Cabinet quilt! If you're a fan of my quilts, first of all, Thank you!, and second of all, you know that I love to make scrappy quilts!  Normally the fabric pulls for my scrappy quilts come from all over my sewing room: yardage (any cut that's a half yard or more), fat quarters, charm squares, mini charm squares, the Alison Glass scrap drawer, the overflow bins of fabric I don't have another home for, and, of course, the humble scrap cabinet. This is where all the random bits of fabric live.  It's mostly pieces of fabric that are too small to be folded into fat quarters for my fat quarter bins and leftover precuts.  I bought the plastic organizer at Michaels a long time ago and it works well for me; I like that I can slide the drawers completely out and bring them over to my cutting table when I'm working with a certain color.  The yellow tray on the bottom holds my brown scraps and the orange

I started the year with grand FPP plans: I would finish up the Rainbow Blossom FPP quilt that I started back in January 2019 and then immediately start work on the new  Under the Sea FPP quilt . Part one of this goal went great; the Rainbow Blossom quilt was finished in January and even used one of the filler blocks from the Under the Sea quilt to tie the two quilts together! Once that was done, I got to work on the Under the Sea quilt.  This was a six-month quilt-along with two new patterns a month, but I decided to make it a year-long quilt-along, piecing one block a month starting in February.  I figured I would make a double block one month and everything would work itself out.  So much new year optimism!  I did start the quilt in February, and today I'm sharing my full progress for the end of the year: seven out of twelve blocks. I didn't set off to neglect the third column of this quilt, so it made my chuckle when I put this outline together and there wasn't a single