BluePip Designs

It's noon on December 31st, and I am done crafting for the year.  My hobbies expanded yet again this year, but this time it wasn't a new craft, it was going to the movies!  I love the peace and quiet of the dark theater and forcing myself to sit still and focus solely on the screen so much that I went 101 times.  Luckily, I still found the time to produce many lovely quilts and assorted small projects.  2026 is bringing big changes to the BluePip house - my oldest teenager is turning 18 and graduating from high school this spring!  I'm not sure I'm ready to be the "parent of an adult", but I also know that I don't have a choice in the matter.  But before all that goes down, let's take one final look back at 2025. Quilts Started in 2025:  16 Quilts Finished in 2025:  20 WIP List on January 1:  13 WIP List on December 31:  9 Number of current, active QAL projects:  0 (But changing soon!) Number of WIPs without any progress:...

This is a 2-for-1 blog post: two full-size Floppy quilts in one blog post! Each quilt features one of the quilt blocks in the Floppy pattern, so together they show off the whole thing. I designed the 3.5 Inch Floppy quilt block first, and it was the first quilt I made too.  I liked how the the floral pattern looked on my small test block , so I decided I wanted to continue with that theme for my full-sized quilt.  The block is jelly roll friendly, so I grabbed a junior jelly roll of Love, Lily by April Rosenthal and got started.   I skipped the white strips because they blended in too well with the labels (this amazing rainbow stripe that took me right back to the 1980s) and ended up with 15 blocks.  This wasn't enough for a full-size throw quilt, so I cut some squares from a coordinating fabric and made a checkerboard quilt.  Turns out, there's...

Once again, my pattern design has taken me back in time to the 1980s, but this time it's a pair of fun nostalgic blocks!  Meet  Floppy ! Floppy disks were the original form of portable data storage and it's amazing to think how far we have come since they were first used.  The original floppy disks held about 1.2 MB of data, which means that the photo above of my Floppy mini quilts would be too big to store on one! You can make a quilt full of Floppys or use them as part of a larger project or an accent on a bag.  Today I am sharing two mini quilts and the baby quilt version of Floppy, and I will post the full-size versions in a separate blog post. I designed the 3.5 inch floppy disk block, or "save icon" as my kids call it, first.  This block can be made with 2/3 of a jelly roll strip as long as the fabric direction doesn't matter.  In this mini quilt version, I put an open lock square on each side for the flopp...