BluePip Designs

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 Wee

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

Summer is not letting go easily!  I survived whooping cough and a second degree burn (from cooking, not my iron!), but also went on two fun overnight trips and finished the Pebbled Prairie pattern , which is a jelly roll friendly pattern that will be released in early September, before National Jelly Roll Day! It's been a little slower on my over on my Instagram feed because so much time has been spent on my computer but I'm looking forward to sewing more in September after the kids go back to school. 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 Halloween Pebbled Prairie (July 2024) Quilts Started Christmas Memories - A new quilt-along that I'm doing with the Fat Quarter Shop for the new Halloween Memories book. Quilt Progress (5 WIPs touched) MMQG Sewing (Test Block Sampler and The Rest of the Quilt Back) - There's only one more month to go in

Good morning!  Now that summer is winding down, I'm jumping into another new quilt-along, this time with the Fat Quarter Shop .  This one features the Moonlight Quilt from the Halloween Memories book by Susan Ache . Oh, it looks my book has been slightly amended!  Since I just finished a Halloween quilt last week (more on that later!), I decided to get a jump on the next holiday and make my version of the quilt in Christmas fabrics.  Because really, any quilt can be made to fit any theme.  I'm going with bold colors and the In From the Cold fabric collection . The red and green coloring sheet is my colors and the orange and purple version is on the back of the book.  Changing the colors will make this look like a completely different quilt!  I'm also very excited about the very tiny fussy cutting that I'm adding in to some of the blocks (this is optional - don't let it scare you off!). Interested in sewing alo