BluePip Designs

I've been on a hard-core "finish it up" streak lately - I haven't started a new project since February, which, to be perfectly honest, is forever for a quilter!  This all changed last week when I got my newest Sew Sampler box in the mail - there was a mini jelly roll of Pinkerville by Tula Pink and I couldn't resist diving into it, especially since I had a cut of Princess in Kona that matched perfectly!


I realize it's not a great picture, but it's not very portable right now!  I'm currently working on quilting my Trinket quilt, but my goal for May is to get this pieced together too!  I am linking up my goal at Elm Street Quilts.

Another successful month!  I finished up about 10 minutes before the kids got off the school bus and had my oldest take this rainy day porch picture when he got home:


I struggled at times to find the "right" fabrics to make my ombre work, but it all came together in the end.  All the fabric (except for the solids) are by Alison Glass, who also designed the pattern.  I've got the backing fabric and a quilting plan - can't wait to get this one out of the sewing room and onto the couch!
I am linking up my finish at Elm Street Quilts.

Where have I been all month?  Piecing Trinket blocks, enjoying the warm spring days between the wet, blustery ones, and making Easter baskets for my kids!




Every time I do something like this I remember that I like making flat things more than 3D things, but I love the finished baskets despite their quirks.  These were extra special because my oldest picked out all the fabric and notions that I used!  I had fun trying new quilt patterns on the insides as well.  The Minecraft bucket is just a simple block pattern, but the Pokemon one has Pokeballs and Picachus and the Harry Potter one has lightning bolts!



Now we have a birthday to celebrate - the owner of that Minecraft basket is a brand-new nine-year-old as of today!

April is here!  It's the month of birthdays and spring break and winter being over - pretty much the best month of the year!  I'm still in "finish-it-up" mode, so my goal this month is going back to Quilt Block Summer: time to finish up my Trinket quilt top!  I have not touched this since last September, and it was about halfway finished when I set it aside.


In the past three weeks, I've sewn 15 more blocks for it as part of the Trinket sew-along on Instagram.  Today kicked off week four and here is my Instagram post from this morning, also featuring part of March's Rainbow Blossom sewing:


The quilt is mostly Alison Glass fabric, but I do through in a few solids when I feel like it!

I'm linking up my goal at Elm Street Quilts.

My Modern Fans quilt is done!  If you scroll back through the blog (or just click that link) you'll see that I finished this top back in November.  I bought a back for it online and when it arrived it was all wrong.  Then I couldn't find anything else that I liked, so the quilt was just in a state of limbo.  Enter my guild challenging us to try new things in 2019!  I took a look at this quilt again, particularly the madras print that was my jumping-off point for the rest of the colors, including the green solid and orange grunge that just scream "Fall!  Pumpkin Patches!  Cool nights!" when you look at them, and decided to take the leap: my first flannel-backed quilt!


I wasn't sure what to expect with the flannel, but it didn't give me any trouble at all.  I did pre-wash it, something I normally don't do, but that was the only change I made.


One other thing that I've been working on is not over-quilting my quilts.  Since the fans are all wonky (for lac…

I'm just popping in today to share my finished Sweet Treat quilt top!


I was a few days late for finishing with the sew-along, but I'm thrilled with how it came out and have no regrets!  It's going into the "finished tops" pile for now - I decided the only acceptable backing is one of the new prints from the Ruby Star Society so I have to wait a few months for it to arrive.  Luckily I have plenty of other things to work on (or maybe I'll just be outside enjoying the beautiful spring weather!).

This is the first block I made for my Rainbow Blossom sampler.  When I finished it I hung it on my sewing room wall (as I sometimes do) and after looking at it for two months I decided I wanted it there permanently!  One morning to quilt it up and one evening to hand-stitch the binding also made it a satisfying fast finish.

The back is just a solid piece that I had laying around - I think it was a freebie from the 2016 shop hop I participated in.  The important part is that it was exactly the right size and I think it's fun to be able to see all the quilting sometimes!


Now back to quilting bigger things!

I celebrated by taking advantage of online sales and buying quilt backs for two different quilts.  I am apparently attracted to shiny new things - both of the backs I selected are only available for pre-order.  One should be here in a week or two, but the other won't come until July (but the wait is totally worth it!).  For now, I thought I'd share a few of the blocks I've been working on this week.

I finished two more blocks for my scrappy trip quilt - that puts it at half-done.


All of the treats in my Sweet Treat quilt are done and ready to be sewn together!  This is a lazy picture - I actually made four grape popsicles, ten ice cream cones, and eight sets of bomb pops.


And I've dusted off my Trinket quilt, which hasn't been touched since Quilt Block Summer ended in September.  I had two big motivators: Alison Glass started a quilt-along for it this week and I got two charm packs of Sun Print 2019 in my February Sew Sampler box' It is unfolded and ironed and …

You may have noticed that I didn't have a celebratory post in February for the completion of my monthly goal.  What happened?  I spent a lot of time sewing blocks for sew-alongs, while telling myself that I could get my goal done in a day, I just needed to give myself a day.  And then, tragedy.  I set out to sew it all up on Sunday the 24th and I didn't have enough fabric to finish it up!  I changed the cutting instructions from the pattern to make half-circles instead of quarter circles and it was just enough to sabotage myself.  I jumped online to buy more instantly, but it didn't get here until the second.  On the plus side, I was able to finish it in two days of sewing!  Anyway, lesson learned: start the monthly goal earlier!


This top has been set aside for now because I need to find the perfect backing fabric for it.  Instead, my goal for March is to finish the Modern Fans quilt top that's been done since November.  My quilt guild challenged us to "try new th…

All the snow we've been getting has made me lazy - case in point, I finished stitching up not one but TWO cross-stitch projects in the last two weeks, one a monthly stitch-along from 2018 and one a Christmas design that hadn't been touched in about 13 months.  As soon as I finish them, I'll share them here.  It's been hard to motivate myself to go downstairs and sew, although I generally find that once I'm down there I don't want to leave!  Here's some of the progress I've made sewing in small chunks.

First, is my scrappy trip around the world.  I'm six blocks in and loving the way all the fabrics are playing together.  I found a backing for this quilt in my stash (bought for a different project online but didn't match it well enough once it arrived) which makes me more excited to work on this.  The picture doesn't quite do the snow we've gotten justice - it was reaching the top of my boots today, which is about 12" from just last …

I'm celebrating with this adorable mini version of the I Heart You pattern by Pen and Paper Designs.  I made this quilt for a swap - my first swap in over a year!  I over-committed in 2017 and swore off swaps in 2018, but I couldn't resist this quick and cute one!  Happy celebrating to you!

My goal for this month is to work on number ten on my 2019 goal list: the Paper Round quilt!  I made all of the curved pieces in January as part of an Instagram challenge and now I just need to piece them together into a complete top.


Normally my goal is to finish the entire quilt, but this month I am going easy on myself.  February is a short month and I don't know what I want to use for the back of the quilt yet, so I am keeping the goal reasonable (plus, there are a few new quilt alongs that are calling my name.  Ice cream quilt, anyone?)

I'm linking up my goal with Elm Street Quilts!

Ta-da!  My beautiful temperature quilt is finished! In a cruel twist of fate, the weather outside is too terrible to take quilt pictures out there, so this indoor picture will have to do for today.  I'm not risking frostbite just to get a nicer picture for my blog!


I've been posting about this for the last year, so there isn't much more to say about it.  I love the random color placement (I'm not good at balanced scrappy) and the freehand orange peel quilting (the grid was already there!).  Up close, it's easy to see they aren't all perfect, but from a distance it looks really good!


My label is fun as well - I used every type of weather-related fabric I could find in my stash.  The stars and gophers represent my state and the shoddy photo-shopping is just getting rid of my exact location.  The five diamonds are the last five days of the year.


I used a thinner binding than I normally do because I didn't want to cut off points with it.  This is actually a tex…

It's January and that means two things:
1. It's time to finish up all of those lingering projects that I started in 2018 and tidy up the sewing room a little bit.
2. New projects everywhere on Instagram!  Quilt Alongs (my weakness) galore!  New fabric from holiday sales sitting in piles everywhere!

How to choose, right?  First of all, we had the air ducts cleaned last week so I did end up tidying up most of my sewing room - didn't want the duct guys to mess up my intricate "floor storage" system!  I should have taken a picture of the clean floor, but it was messy again almost as soon as the guys had left and I ran the vacuum cleaner over the carpet quickly.  You can, however, see that my secondary sewing table is turning into quite the fabric pile.


The most important part of that picture, however, is my temperature quilt under the needle being quilted!  I'm doing freehand orange peels (taking advantage of that grid) and it's turning out beautifully!

But t…

My first finish for 2019 is the newest quilt from The Fat Quarter Shop, Starling!  For this quilt, I used one of the new Color Master boxes from Art Gallery Fabrics.  I decided to take the name of the quilt pattern literally and use the gold box, especially after I fell in love with this Connect the Stars fabric for the background!


One thing to note is that the boxes are random, so the fat quarters you see in the picture are not necessarily the ones you are going to get (mine don't match the product listing!).  It's a fun way to build a scrappy collection.
Two of the fat quarters had a bit more white in them, so those got pieced together into strips and used on the back of the quilt.  They look much better there than they would have chopped up on the front.  You may also notice that I couldn't resist piecing a couple of tiny moons into the center block of my quilt - that giant square was just begging to be spiced up a tiny bit!

This was the second quilt I got to quilt on m…

There's something about January that just makes me want to clean up lingering odds and ends.  This scrap quilt has been done for several weeks except for patching a small hole I tore I on the back during quilting and taking photographs to share with everyone.  I'm happy to say that with the new year, I've buckled down and done both, meaning there's one less item on my WIP list (or at least there was until I started a new quilt this week!).


This quilt is made up of 40 of the blocks from the 100 Days 100 Blocks 2018 quilt along.  I upsized the blocks to 10" each with the intent of making two baby quilts.  But when I finished I realized I didn't really need two baby quilts, so I just sewed the two of them together to make one epic couch quilt.  Or maybe it'll end up on someone's bed; it's long enough that it takes all three of my boys to hold it up for a picture!  Either way, it was a "free quilt", made entirely from my scraps and just for f…

A new year of goals starts today, and there's only one logical one to start the year off with: finishing my 2018 temperature quilt!  This quilt was so fun to make - if you are considering making something like this I would highly encourage it!  I didn't get to start mine until the second week of January last year so you still have plenty of time to choose a design and buy fabric without being too far behind.

In my quilt, the outer solid fabric represents the low temperature each day and the inner print fabric represents the high temperature each day.  Most of them are blenders, but special days are marked with fussy cut fabric.


My last five blocks will be incorporated into the quilt label on the back (365 doesn't divide into a nice grid for a quilt).  I also made a chart to show what temperatures the colors correspond to; my lovely mother-in-law did the embroidery of the numbers for me.


Now I just need to finish the back, quilt, and bind!  I'm linking up my goal at Elm…

A big thank you to Cheryl at Elm Street Quilts for hosting a fun year of monthly goals!  I didn't win any prizes, but I did complete 11 of the 12 goals I set for myself and I'm pretty proud of that!

December is a pretty busy month for me so I didn't want anything too stressful.  I had a post a few weeks ago about some random sewing that I finished up (including showing off where the block from my December goal post showed up).  I also worked a lot on a secret sewing project that I should be able to share next week.  But when it comes to my December goal of "sewing something I love" I ended up with a tie!  The first thing I love is my finished temperature quilt top, which is done only because the last five blocks are going on the back as part of the quilt label.


The second thing I love is this little Christmas tree ornament I made for my son.  I coach his First Lego League team and he asked me if I could make him an ornament to match this year's shirt.  I had …

The year is almost over, which means everyone (including me!) is publishing their "best of" 2018 lists.  Today I'm going to share my five favorite finishes from 2018 and hope that that motivates me to finish up my lingering 2018 WIPs!

1. There's no question as to what number one is - my huge, mostly paper-pieced Release the Kraken quilt!  This was a block of the month quilt I made mostly in 2017.  Some months I used the provided alternate patterns and one month I made up my own!  I did a lot of work on the quilting, matching thread colors and using a variety of motifs.


2. My first finish from 2018 is also a favorite - Dwight B. Plaid! I even made him a matching pillow (it only took 10 months to finish that!).  This was  a mash-up of two different quilt patterns, a common theme in my quilting.


3. I'm not going real far back for this one - my Text Flags quilt! I love the movement in the gray fabric and the colorful low-volume fabrics. I've experimented with …

Welcome to my 2019 planning party!  I am a big fan of finishing stuff and crossing it off the old to-do list, but right now my to-do list is out of control. I went a little crazy starting stuff in 2018, so it looks like 2019 is going to be all about picking up the pieces.  On the plus side, that means most of the projects on this list are very close to completion.  On the minus side, I want to start new stuff!  My work-in-progress list isn't that long compared to many of the ones I see online (14 quilting projects, two of which I should have done by the end of 2018), but looking at it makes me not want to quilt, which isn't really my goal here!

My 2018 list started at 12 items and then bloomed to 16 after I launched Quilt Block Summer.  Unfortunately, I didn't do all that well - only five of the sixteen items were finished.  Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with what I did finish, but this year I am hoping for a much better showing!  So, without further ado, here is t…