BluePip Designs

Hello!  I'm still here and sewing despite the lack of new posts.  I've actually finished two lovely quilts recently, but they are both waiting on summer road trips (to two different locations!) for their final photography sessions.  I know it would be fine to take them locally, but sometimes a fun location that fits perfectly makes documenting the quilt that much better.  I keep a physical photo album with printed photos of every crafty project I've ever finished dating back over twenty years! One thing that is ready to be shared is this finished Pin Banner .  It's been a full year since I released the Pin Banner pattern and this one was made by special request for a high schooler who earned a varsity letter this year.  To celebrate the anniversary, I'm offering 20% off of the Pin Banner pattern through the end of the month, no code needed, in case you have a need for one as well. I also took my annual field tri...

I enjoyed my finished  Blue Four Patch quilt so much that I wanted to start another leaders-and-enders quilt immediately after finishing it.  My blue scrap drawer was still overflowing (and to be honest, probably will be forever because it's my favorite color) so I knew the next project would feature blue as well.  I decided to pair the blue scraps with my also overflowing white scrap drawer to create a coin quilt.  A coin quilt is something that has been on my quilty bucket list for a long time, but felt kind of boring to make as my "featured project", which means it was perfect for some background sewing! For me, a scrappy quilt works better if there are a couple of rules when I'm piecing it together.  Because I wanted something that I could finish in less than seven years, I needed more lax rules that I had in my previous leaders-and-enders quilt so I settled on four: Only use blues that read as blue - avoid...

As always, the year started off hot with a lot of finishes!  I love that post-holidays energy boost.  I also spent some time cleaning up the recently defunct Make Modern affiliate links (this is their last year publishing) and updated Project Quilting links.  If you find a dead link on my blog and need help finding where it is supposed to go, please let me know so I can fix it up. Quilt Tally WIP List to Start the Quarter:  9 WIP List to End the Quarter: 9 Active QAL Projects: 1 Untouched in 2026: 4 Finished in Q1: 7 quilts, 3 cross-stitch projects, 2 small projects Let's jump right in and look at how I did with my Q1 Goals : 2026 Q1 Goal 1: Cuddlekiss Release Cuddlekiss was released on its planned date of February 1st!  It's never too early to start next year's Valentine's Day project (or any project to show your love for someone) so go check it out! Cuddlekiss Here Kitty ...

Welcome to my final Project Quilting challenge for 2026, A Happy Handful .  I knew I needed to do a small project for this week, and the theme did a good job of not tempting me to go big. Pretzel is yet another potholder!  You can never have too many, and it's fun to experiment with different sizes and techniques.  This week I debated with myself over doing a traditional binding or brown-bagging it , and I'm glad that the traditional binding won.  It's the right finish for this particular project. One of the things on my personal Project Quilting challenge list for this year was to use a block from the 100 Paper Pieced Quilt Blocks book I found in my sewing room (and don't remember buying, oops).  I had the idea for the general layout and quilt plan ready to go, but couldn't decide on which block to use.  So I went to my go-to of bugging my family!  My husband was the first person I saw and I asked him to...

I'm jumping in late with my Project Quilting project this week because I made a grave mistake: I finally basted my Blue Coin quilt on Monday.  It has been ready and waiting since before Christmas, and the fates finally aligned for me to get it done.  And once I have a freshly basted quilt, I cannot resist immediately starting to quilt it.  So all my sewing time this week was taken up by ditch-stitching the horizontal lines in it.  I didn't want to switch over from my walking foot to my piecing foot so I was "stuck". But the good news is, I finished the last horizontal line today (and the trimming) and was able to move on to my Project Quilting project!  I started this week with a brief refresher on what complimentary colors are and I absolutely fell in love with this paint-swatch demonstration of them (you can see it in the splash screen above if you don't want to click the link).  I then spent a lot of...

This week's Project Quilting challenge was a fun one: Of Another Era!  We could interpret "era" however we wanted, and I chose a project that hit several of them.  I'll start in reverse order with the barn in the splashscreen above.  This is where I took a lot of my early quilt photos because I liked the big white wall as a neutral background (see Temperature Quilt or Epic Rainbow Bowtie as examples). It didn't work so well today because we stopped after basketball and it was too snowy for my slide-wearing quilt holder, but I did snap a photo from the parking lot.  Presenting the Button Box baby quilt! Button Box is based on a vintage 1930s design, and I shrunk the pattern down to a baby size myself (it's square, just a wind issue).  I'd also like to note that making a piano key border has been on my "quilty wish list" forever and I don't know why it took me so long to finally make one!  I'm ha...

This week's Project Quilting challenge took me on a journey to choose my project.  I went from horse to carousel to amusement parks to my Fair Day pattern .  Then, I took a trip to my local quilt store to find some horse fabric to meet the challenge in two ways, and ended up falling in love with a black and white seahorse print.  Thus, the Seahorse Fair Day quilt was born! Fair Day is a four-color quilt pattern I wrote three years ago and it was fun to revisit again for this challenge.  I couldn't find a fourth color I liked until it was time to piece the back, then I discovered the perfect complimentary fabric in my stash - oops! As you can see from this picture, I should have bought another 12 inches of the seahorse fabric.  You also may think that the two fabrics are slightly mismatched.  But, if you zoom in you can see that the seahorses are not actually black and white, some of them are a very light ...