BluePip Designs

Pattern release month!  After a year of work and a major redesign, Pebbled Prairie is finally available to all of you!  Maybe someday I'll show off the earlier versions, but for now I'm just enjoying the post-release-day joy (and making quilt-along versions of it, naturally).  I could stop the whole blog post right here, but I actually did work on some other projects too, so let's give them their due as well. Quilt Tally WIP List at beginning of month: 13 WIP List at end of month: 13 Untouched in 2024: 4 Active QAL Projects: 2 Quilts Finished Lemon Blossom Mystery Quilt (May 2024) Baby Pebbled Prairie (September 2024) Quilts Started Brown Fabric Challenge - My friend Kerry sent me a fat quarter of a brown fabric earlier this year with the note "make anything you want from this!".  I actually cut into it already and used a bit of it in my Kona Solids quilt , but now, with the deadline looming, I'm making a piece...

Welcome to the Pebbled Prairie Quilt-Along !  I'm so happy you decided to sew along with me! This is a five-week quilt-along taking place in the month of October.  The pace is very relaxed so if you only have a little bit of time each week you'll easily be able to keep up.  I'll be making the large throw version out of my Ruby Star stash.  I made this mock-up, but the fabrics in it are just generic EQ8 images; we'll see where my stash takes me! The Pebbled Prairie pattern is jelly roll and fat quarter friendly.  It takes two jelly rolls to make either of the throw versions, but you could also just buy one and then use fabric from your stash to supplement it.  I'll be posting each Sunday to share my progress and give tips about my process.  The weeks below will be updated when a new blog post goes live: Week One: Cutting Week Two: Color A  - includes tutorial! Week Three: Color B Week Fo...

I took a different approach to making my baby version of Pebbled Prairie .  I felt like all of my mock-ups were leaning towards the same colorway so I asked my sister-in-law to pick the colors for me.  The only guideline I gave her were the colors I wanted to avoid. I think she did a great job!  These are not colors I ever would have picked and it gives the quilt top an entirely different feel.  Perhaps I should have used a darker gray color in the outer ring, but having two lighter colors in the rings gives it an interesting secondary pattern that I really like.  This version also shows off the traditional grid layout versus the more modern offset layout of the throw size that I shared yesterday. I decided the quilt needed a scrappy back to finish it off properly, and both of these pieces were laying out in my sewing room.  The gray is from the back of my Lemon Blossom , which I am slowly quilting right now and the b...

It's pattern release day!  Say hello to Pebbled Prairie , the newest BluePip Designs pattern! This design came to me in the middle of one of my daily walks last fall.  I had to detour from my normal route due to some road construction and ended up walking through the parking lot of the original high school for my town.  I'd been there before many times (my middle son went to preschool there), but never actually looked  at the building. But that day, I noticed it and immediately decided it needed to be my next quilt pattern. I spent the rest of my walk thinking about how I could turn that into a quilt pattern.  I started with a literal interpretation, but by the time I got home I had decided on a scrappier version.  I walked in the house and immediately sat down and started sketching so I wouldn't forget. I also added alternate layouts that have a more traditional and less modern feel.  By adding an extra column to the thro...