BluePip Designs

July was a month full of sewing deadlines and I made all of them!  I was helped by the fact that my husband and all three kids went camping for a week without me so I had a lovely week of sewing and reading and relaxing on my own. Quilt Tally WIP List at beginning of month: 13 WIP List at end of month: 13 Untouched in 2024: 4 Active QAL Projects: 1 Quilts Finished Layer Cake Lily (June 2024) Baby Shark (July 2024) Quilts Started Pebbled Prairie - Halloween version!  This is my newest quilt pattern and I am planning on releasing it at the end of August, in time for National Sew a Jelly Roll Day.  I've wanted to do a pre-cut friendly quilt for a while and this one is absolutely beautiful. Quilt Progress (6 WIPs touched) MMQG Sewing (Test Block Sampler and The Rest of the Quilt Back) - It's curves this month!  I used the backs of two different quilts this month - the red is from the Windsuit Mini Quilt and the gray is from the ...

Now that the rush of preparing for the quilt show  and making two baby quilts ( one and two ) is over, I'm filling my calendar up with new quilt-alongs. I was looking for a photo of the first mystery quilt-along that I did for an Instagram post and realized that it pre-dates my blog.  So today I present to you, the Midnight Mystery Quilt ! My love of quilt-alongs started early, and while this wasn't the first one that I ever did, it was the first mystery one.  I started it in July of 2015 and finished it in March of 2016.  According to my official quilt tracking spreadsheet, it is the 38th quilt that I ever started.  I remember reading the fabric requirements and instantly deciding that I wanted to use both pink and orange fabrics and then just going for it, but not much else about the actual construction process or how I picked the final fabrics. It's also one of the first quilts that I quilted myself and this photo of the back shows some of the custom quiltin...

I love a baby shower because it's a fun opportunity to make a tiny-sized quilt for a brand-new adorable human.  This quilt is for my cousin's new child coming sometime next month. The pattern is called Shark Bay and I was inspired by this toy fish that was on her baby registry. This close-up picture shows the colors of the stripes better too.  For once, I didn't overquilt the quilt - I stitched in the ditch on both sides of the separator rows between the rows of sharks and then pulled out my ruler foot and my wavy ruler to do the waves in the stripes.  It was far easier to do the ruler across a whole row than it was to do it in the tiny trees ! The back is a sea of pastel fish swimming in a peachy red ocean and the binding is a navy solid from my stash - a nice change from my normal black.  This quilt has a lovely drape and I'm sure baby and parents will love it! -------- I'm linking this post up with Quilting JetGirl as my favorite finish of July 2024!

I feel like I just finished writing my Q1 check-in post so seeing Yvonne's post on my blog feed was a bit of a surprise to me - the last three months have just flown by.  Most of my sewing time was spent focusing on my BluePip Designs business .  BluePip is starting to feel more like an actual small business venture and less of a part-time hobby and I'm happy with that!  I'm also making time to sew non-business things so that my hobby doesn't fall by the wayside.  Right now, I am happy with the balance I have between the two sides of my quilting. This time around, I'll start by talking about my professional goals and then go into my personal goals: Goal: Finish Creating Paper Patterns  ✅ I created paper patterns for Windsuit , Zephyr , and Bernie's Mittens .  I started with  Windsuit  because it was freshest in my mind (thus the easiest to reformat), then  Bernie's Mittens  because it's a shorter pattern, and f...