BluePip Designs

It's June and the annual Minnesota Quilt Show has just ended.  In previous years, I've had quilts in the special exhibit hall and was part of a panel talking about pattern design .  This year, I dipped my toe in a bit farther and entered a quilt in the judged category.  Presenting Mini Zephyr! One of the categories this year was "miniaturization", or making a tiny quilt that could be mistaken for a full-size quilt in a photograph if there wasn't a point of reference available.  As soon as I saw this, I immediately became obsessed and had to try it with Zephyr . The mini Zephyr, or "Love Letters via Zephyr" as it was officially entered into the quilt show, has the exact same number of blocks as the two cover quilts, it's just made at a very small scale.  I actually used the baby size Zephyr as a guide for fabric placement ( this is the bottom quilt ). And here's how it looks compared to ...

It's summertime at last!  If you have school-aged kids, then I'm sure your May was filled with end-of-year concerts and celebration assemblies too.  My high schoolers are active in drama and two years ago, my oldest and I designed a banner to display the varsity letter he earned .  This year, my middle child lettered for the first time and asked if I could make him the same thing to display his letter.  As I was measuring the original banner to reverse engineer how I made it, I thought "I should write this down in case my youngest wants one in a few years too," which turned in to me writing this project pattern! It's been a while since I wrote up a project pattern, and it was fun to write something a little less involved than a full quilt pattern.  This little project can be finished in a single afternoon, with very little hand sewing (aka, there's no bias binding to make and attach). Pin Banner is sized to fit one let...

One thing you may have noticed about me is that I don't like to let a finished top sit.  I might drag my feet on finishing the top, as my never-ending WIP list can attest, but once it's done, I want the whole quilt to be done.  The only notable exception before now that I can think of is my Sweet Treat quilt , which sat because I was waiting for the Ruby Star Ice Cream print to come out to use as my backing fabric. Last year, I designed this quilt blocks for a row challenge quilt put on by my quilt guild.  My partner picked a classic block for each row and I put a modern twist on it.  Then we wrote up both patterns and released them to the guild so they could choose whichever one they preferred for their own quilts.  This was a great exercise for me because each row used a different technique, which meant practicing different types of pattern writing.  The picture above is a little misleading because all of the blocks ar...

Well, I didn't intend to take a month-plus blogging break, but it's been pretty quiet on the sewing front around here.  It's hard to resist being outside when spring finally rolls around!  However, I did finish a long-term leaders and enders quilt project a few weeks ago and I'm excited to share it today: At some point prior to May 2018 I must have had an idea for these cream squares,* because that's when I found a large box of them in my sewing room closet.  I had no idea when or why I cut them, but there were so many of them I knew there was a project there.  I decided to use them to make a leaders and enders scrappy four-patch quilt in which each four-patch was a unique blue fabric.  All shades of blue except for solids were welcome. Instead of digging through my scraps and stash to prep the blue blocks, I decided to only use cut-offs from the blues in projects I was already making.  It was exciting each time I ...

I did it!  I got my WIP list down to ten!  Even more exciting, one of the quilts on that list is currently being quilted so there is a chance it might dip down even further.  I have been writing monthly recap posts for a long time now and I cannot remember it ever being this close to single digits before.  The first three months of the year have flown by, so it's already time to see how I did with my  goals for Q1 and make some new ones for Q2. Quilt Tally WIP List to Start the Quarter:  13 WIP List to End the Quarter: 10 Active QAL Projects:  1 Untouched in 2025:  7 Finished in Q1:  9 quilts, 4 cross-stitch projects, 6 small projects 2025 Q1 Goal 1: Switch Over to Quarterly Recap Posts Done. The best kind of goal - I accomplished this by not doing anything!  I hope you haven't missed my monthly check-ins too much as I tinker with how to spend my quilty time. 2025 Q1 Goal 2: Project Quilting I kept it ...

Good morning!  Today I am sharing some variations of my brand-new Space Parade pattern.  My mother-in-law is my number one pattern tester and she loves this quilt pattern so much that she immediately made two versions of it (in under a week!) and is planning a third! Her first top is the rectangular throw version of the quilt using the scrappy instructions.  She bought the black background fabric then used up all the bee fabric that she has been hoarding for the past few years.  The random placement of her fabric really dances across the quilt and makes it bee-u-tiful! She also dug into her stash and made a two-color baby Space Parade quilt.  The baby sized quilt makes two extra blocks and she incorporated these into the border she added. Finally, I couldn't resist making a baby version of the quilt in rainbow!  I used the scrappy single-block instructions in the pattern, but also pulled solid scraps from my stash to ma...

It's a beautiful spring Tuesday, the perfect day for a pattern release.  It's time to blast into outer space with  Space Parade , the newest BluePip Designs pattern! As you can see, my obsession with postage stamp quilts is still going strong.  This iteration started with my attempt to design a houndstooth quilt block and morphed into an Irish-chain-type design! I did my original mock-up in the green and black color way that ended up being the cover version of the quilt.  My husband's input was "Cool!  That quilt looks like the old Space Invaders video game!" and he asked me to make him the quilt in those exact colors.  This was an easy enough request and I was happy to comply.  I used Stardust in Ebony by Dear Stella for the background fabric because the name seemed appropriate and a batik called Dotted Sparkles in Peridot by Robert Kaufman for the lime green feature fabric. I quilted this first ver...