BluePip Designs

Welcome to Week 5 of the Pebbled Prairie Quilt-Along !  It's time to see your quilt top come together! I didn't realize how many of my blue fabrics were pictorial so there was a lot of fussy cutting to make the most of them.  I also went full scrappy with these blocks, which means there are a lot of different fabrics in play here.  Finally, it's my first time not using a solid for the borders and sashing and I'm really happy with how this blender looks! I'll share some close-ups and more details about my fabrics in the final quilt-along post.  All I'll say now, is that all of the patchwork fabrics came directly from my Ruby Star stash; I only bought the sashing/border fabrics for this quilt. The final quilt parade for the Pebbled Prairie Quilt-Along is going to be on November 17th.  If you have a finished quilt top of any size (doesn't have to be quilted) I would love to feature it here.  One person who submi

A very short recap post this month - I didn't spend a lot of time in my sewing room but I did bake a delicious cake and take second in a speed puzzle competition.  It's not too late to make a top for my Pebbled Prairie quilt-along if you'd like a chance to win a prize for a finished top! Quilt Tally WIP List at beginning of month: 13 WIP List at end of month: 14 Untouched in 2024: 4 Active QAL Projects: 2 Quilts Finished Christmas Memories (August 2024) Brown Fabric Challenge (September 2024) Quilts Started Marble Mystery Quilt  - I'm starting a month late - it's not too late for you to join in either.  In a shocking twist of events, I didn't use a directional fabric (it feels like all my recent projects have used directional fabric and fussy cutting) so it was nice to sew for a bit without worrying about fabric placement. Ruby Star Pebbled Prairie -  my quilt-along quilt ! S

Welcome to Week 4 of the Pebbled Prairie Quilt-Along !   More of the same this week as we are assembling the final color ring.  I'm dipping deep into my Ruby Star stash and pulling out some long-hoarded old favorites. Doing so, made me realize that my original Cotton + Steel throw quilt has never been posted here!  If you do a deep dive on my personal instagram, you can probably find it - I made this quilt almost exactly nine years ago, between September and December 2015.  My photo organization skills were not quite as good back then, but with a lot of digging through the old folders I managed to find the original (and only) photo of it. I could have taken a new one, but I like the original photos for these throwbacks.  The pattern is called Perfect 10 , and that's all I can remember unfortunately.  At the time, my oldest was in second grade and the other two were home with me most of the day so it's amazing that I e

At the beginning of the year, my friend Kerry launched a challenge to show the color brown a little love.  She asked us to make anything we wanted with a piece of brown fabric that she would send us.  I was immediately in.  The deadline was the end of October, so, nine months after I received her package, here is my finished brown challenge project: I made a brown table runner based on Retro Crochet quilt pattern (I purchased the pattern but reduced the scale to fit my project).  The brown color that Kerry sent me was labeled Kona Sable and the binding is an unlabeled brown solid from my stash.  The rest is a true scrappy masterpiece: the yellow and white fabrics are from my Rest of the Quilt Back test blocks , the green is from my Christmas Memories quilt , and the brown print is leftover binding from my Halloween Pebbled Prairie quilt . The back gets into the scrappy fun too - a pattern called "Retro Crochet" is pretty much beggin

Welcome to Week 3 of the Pebbled Prairie Quilt-Along !  This week was a little more work because I didn't have my fabrics pre-cut, but I had fun choosing my fabrics.  My color B is "pink" but since I'm working all from stash and only with my Ruby Star fabrics , I used whatever was close, just like with the yellows .  Some are a little more peachy and one is a little more gray, but overall it's a good mix of pinky fabrics.  The corner square of each block is the same pink fabric, but I used sixteen different fabrics for the rest of the ring in each of the larger squares. My goal this week is "randomization".  If you look closely at the two versions of Pebbled Prairie in the QAL graphic, you can see that I laid out my fabrics in a pattern.  This time I really stretched myself to not do that.  I alternated whether a single fabric was placed horizontally or vertically in each block, but other than that I plac

Welcome to Week 2 of the Pebbled Prairie Quilt-Along !  This is my favorite week in any quilt-along, or in any quilt project really: the week we start to sew the fabrics together! I have all my squares cut out and today I'm going to show you my easy method for randomizing fabric placement and keeping all the pieces in the right places when sewing them together in nine patch blocks.   The secret is the answer key in the back of a Sudoku puzzle book! First, arrange your squares into nine equal piles and number them.  Each individual fabric should only be in one pile, but it's ok if one pile has multiple fabrics in it.  For example, my pile 4 has a mix of three fabrics so the bird fabric will not be in every 9-patch.  But, if I had the bird fabric in two different piles, then the bird would appear twice in the same 9-patch. Once the fabric is sorted, choose four squares from any answer key (I drew a pink box around the ones I was

Welcome to Week 1 of the Pebbled Prairie Quilt-Along !  I'm so happy you decided to sew along with me! We are starting off this week with cutting. Or, if you are like me, some of the cutting. I get too impatient to see how the block is going to look and just start sewing.  So for week one, I cut the squares for my 9-patches and my vertical sashing.  I'm excited for this to be my first non-solid fabric sashing version of Pebbled Prairie ! I bought the sashing fabric because I didn't have a piece large enough in my stash, but the plan is for everything else to come from my vintage Cotton and Steel and current Ruby Star stash.  I was especially excited to use up the long skinny side off-cuts from my Sew Place Like Home quilt back. I stacked my squares in nine piles for the nine patches that we will be making next week.  You can see that two of the piles have multiple fabrics in them; this will add more variety to my finished quilt.  If you look closel

Good morning! It's the beginning of October and that means it is time to look back at my goals for the third quarter of the year.  I only had two goals for Q3 , and I'm happy to report that I achieved both of them! Q3 Goal 1: Pattern Releases I was working on two patterns at the end of Q2 and both are complete.  My Pebbled Prairie pattern is now available in both print and PDF form!  I wrote this pattern at the beginning of the year and then delayed it because of a design concern.  This has been addressed and it's now out in the world for everyone to enjoy. I love my Halloween version of the quilt, but I realize that that's not the most practical choice for marketing the quilt year-round.  My other quilt samples were made with the original pattern design so they aren't usable for promoting it; as a result, I'm planning on spending October making another quilt in a less-seasonal color palette.  I'm running a quilt-along for anyone

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) - Blog post coming this week! 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 deadli

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 Four: Color C   - inc

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 blue is the back of my origina

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 throw-size layout, Pebbled