BluePip Designs

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 ...

In the past, I wasn't much for themed quilts.  Some of my quilts were themed, but they still got tossed in the general pile in the family room and people just used whatever was closest when they wanted a quilt (or dug through the pile for a flannel-backed quilt because those are the most popular, but no one really cared what the front looked like).  But recently, something changed.  I made a point to round up all the Christmas quilts and put them in the family room (I even took some non-Christmas ones out to encourage the use of the Christmas quilts) and it made me happy to be sitting under a Christmas-themed quilt with the tree lights twinkling merrily beside me.  So I dug out my Stranger Things quilt and made sure I used it as we watched each new episode.  And you know what?  I think I'm a convert!   Meet Cuddlekiss , my brand-new Valentine's Day quilt pattern!  What I love about this pattern is that...

One of my enduring goals is to catch up on all my old quilt-alongs (QALs) - they are so fun to start but hard to finish.  When I talked about my double-digit WIP list, most of the items on it were QALs that I had lost interest in.  Last year I really buckled down, finishing three QALs and starting zero!  2025 QAL Finishes: Marble Mystery , The Rest of the Quilt Back , Pooh Corner My WIP list currently has two old QAL projects on it and both of them are almost finished: the 2019 Summer Sampler (1 block and a lot of setting away from completion) and Under the Sea (3 main blocks and some finishing blocks).  However, there are several new QALs I want to start in 2026 so I made a deal with myself: one old QAL block before I start a new QAL project. One Under the Sea compass block down, one new QAL started guilt-free!   Farm Fresh  is a new QAL from Lori Holt featuring her old books, Farm Girl Vin...

This week's Project Quilting challenge features one of my favorite types of fabric: Plaid!  Of course I've made the Plaidish quilt , and one of my first PQ challenges was a plaid scarf .  I've also done a couple of plaid-inspired tops, like Dwight B Plaid and Giraffe Love .  Finally, it often shows up on the back of my quilts, especially when the back is a warm snuggly flannel (see Meeple Colorblock or Camp Stars or the Sudoku Quilt or Modern Fans ).  But this week, I decided to piece my own over-sized plaid potholder. My husband says it looks like I just quilted a piece of existing plaid fabric, and I take that as a compliment because it means that I did a good job of picking fabrics.  These are actually all off-cuts of backing fabric from other projects, so it makes me even happier that they all play so well together.  The lightest fabric is from the Macaron Mystery Quilt , the black is from my Cuddlekiss pattern ,...

Welcome to January and another season of Project Quilting ! I was initially stumped by the theme for week one, A Clean Slate , so I went to my go-to spot for inspiration: typing random phrases into Google Images to see what comes up. I didn't use the words "quilt" or "quilt pattern" because I was looking for inspiration, not a pattern. It took a bit, but with a little tweaking of my search terms this little sprout appeared amid all the images of chalkboards. Once I saw it, I couldn't get it out of my head. I decided to combine it with the pile of low-volume scraps that were too small for my Blue Coin quilt and this was the result. The rock in the picture is a large decorative boulder that came with our house. My kids take all of their first day of school pictures standing on it, so it also symbolizes a clean slate to me - the beginning of a new school year. I made up my own paper piecing pattern for the sprout...