BluePip Designs

Today I am welcoming the newest 100 Days Quilt to the 100 Days Archive : Bananas! Bananas is the 8th quilt that I have made with Ange and her 100 Days quilt-along challenge .  My theme this year is solids and low volume.  Each block was made up of solids and low volume prints from my stash.  In fact, only one fabric was purchased for this entire quilt, a low volume one that goes with the green block in the upper left. The back is also from my stash, a colorful wideback that I have no recollection of purchasing.  It was a little bit short, so I extended it with the black (ink?) Spotted fabric that I also bound the quilt with.  I liked the Twister pantograph from my Wizard of Oz quilt  so much that I had Lauren use it again on this one.  It's such a nice all-over pattern! If you are counting carefully, you may notice that this quilt has more than 100 blocks in it.  I opted for one of the optional layouts, which required making many of the blocks...

It's time, it's time!  My favorite quilt-along starts again today: 100 Days 100 Blocks 2023 !  All the details are at that link, but in a nutshell, there are 100 different blocks that you sew over 100 days.  This year, the quilt-along is using a brand-new pattern called Maple and Eucalyptus.  I really like that the blocks are all different sizes, which you can see in this photo I took of my blocks 1 and 2 together: Yes, I did make 4 identical block 2 blocks.  I love the rainbow cover version of this quilt, but I also love a challenge so I am going to make the Bananas variation , a free pattern expansion.  This means I'll be making 246 total blocks.  As with all versions of the quilt, I've set some rules for myself.  In other years I've done  black and white , pandas , and blue/green blocks .  This year I'm focusing on solids and low volume!  My rules starting out are: The feature fabric of each block is a solid and the background fa...

Only 41 days to go until one of my favorite quilt-alongs of the year starts: 100 Days 100 Blocks .  Ange has a brand-new pattern this year and I can't wait to dive in and make it.  This will be my ninth time participating in this quilt-along!  But first, I need to share quilt number eight: the Black and White Kinship Quilt! This quilt started, oddly enough, with the backing fabric.  I had purchased a wideback online for another project (I don't even remember which one anymore) and decided that it didn't work with the top.  It got put into a box and largely forgotten. My mother-in-law saw it when she was visiting and told me that the only top that it would match well was a black-and-white top, and I knew instantly it was going to go with my next 100 Days quilt.  I like to have a loose theme for each one (they are all scrappy) and black-and-white was one I hadn't tried before. I was also excited because I had a lot of black-and-white novelty prints, like the...

How did you do with the  2021 version of 100 Days 100 Blocks ?  This year, I didn't participate in all 100 days; instead I made one of the brand-new bonus layout versions, named The Challenger . If you read my 100 Days recap post , you know that one of my favorite parts of the quilt-along is to pick a challenge for myself.  For this version, I was working with a limited set of fabric - a fat eighth bundle of selected fabrics from  Wonderland fabric by Rifle Paper Co and some coordinating fat quarters pulled from my stash.  I then chose Spotted in Royal as a background fabric because the color reminded me of Alice's dress.  I'm not a huge fan of sashing, so I decided to make each block "float" by including the background fabric at least once.  I'm very pleased with the overall effect! I knew I wasn't going to make all 100 blocks before I started, so I was able to chose which blocks worked best with my fabric.  I chose to alternate blocks tha...

It's June 1st!  Only one month until my favorite annual quilt-along begins: 100 Days 100 Blocks hosted by Angie at Gnome Angel!  I've made six quilts in this quilt-along over the years and I'm looking forward to this year just as much! My first 100 Days quilt was the Animal City quilt in 2016.  Each block has a different animal print and a solid fabric. In 2018, I split the 100 blocks between two different quilts (some blocks are in both quilts).  One version is all blue and green scraps  with the blocks enlarged to 10".  In hindsight, I wish I would have assembled them in a checkerboard pattern, but this one gets frequent use by the kids so I guess it's fine as is! The other blocks went into what is probably my favorite 100 Days quilt, Pandamonium .  I chose a single focus fabric and four coordinating solids, then used scrappy fabrics that matched the solids. In 2019, the pattern switched to Angie's own Kins...

Another year of 100 Days 100 Blocks is in the book!  This year's entry was a big, beautiful pair of scissors   (affiliate link) .  I've labeled this as a QAL, but this time around I made it on my own schedule.  I needed a project to get myself out of my early-pandemic sewing rut and, with a little encouragement from Angie , I decided to go ahead and just get started before the official event start. My version is 100% scrappy.  I have an overall background fabric that was leftover from another quilt project and that was mixed in with low volume scraps.  I was very liberal with the pattern, changing measurements to fussy cut scraps (I highly recommend this ruler   (affiliate link) for super easy fussy cutting!)  I wanted to include and moving blocks around to better suit myself. The only thing I respected was the actual imprint of the scissors! When I was done with the blocks, I added a one inch border to use up the rest of my background fabric...

Today is the first day of the 2020  100 Days 100 Blocks at Gnome Angel !  There are two great patterns to chose from this year.   Kinship  was released last year and resulted in this scrappy beauty: There's also a brand-new pattern called "Making the Cut" which creates a giant pair of scissors (there's also a more traditional layout included).  This pattern was actually released back in April and I got impatient and started it a little early - it was exactly the distraction I needed when all the COVID stuff was scary and overwhelming and my sewjo was disappearing fast.  Mine is close to being finished already! In addition, I participated in the pre-event Block Battle Contest .  I didn't win but I had fun making my blocks and seeing people vote on them.  My second block even tied with the eventual winner!  Thank you to anyone who voted on mine and congratulations to the winners! I won't be participating in the official quilt-along becaus...

Pandamonium is finished!  This one is subtitled "Panda Love" because everyone who sees it tells me how much they love the pandas!  I started with a basic color palette inspired by the panda fabric itself (shown in the lower righthand corner block) and the rest is scrappy around that, using a tally mark system to balance the colors in the quilt.  The sashing is Spectrastatic in Lunar , my new favorite blender, and was purchased over a year after the blocks were finished. Finishing this top was my successful February goal and you can read more about the layout in that post.  When I came back to it, I had a happy surprise: I knew that I had bought the hexagon panda fabric to back the quilt in, but completely forgot that I had bought an equal amount of yardage of a hexagon neutral from the same collection.  That simplified making my back - I no longer had to piece an entire center strip together.  I settled for a single stripe to show off my color palet...

Another sew-along is over and my Kinship quilt is done! This was a fun "free" quilt - it is entirely made up from scraps.  I mainly focused on using up random charm and mini charm squares, but any piece of fabric in my sewing room was fair game.  My kids had fun with this too - if they wandered in while I was choosing fabric I let them pull the fabric for me.  The back is by Carolyn Friedlander ; it was purchased for my Paper Round quilt and then rejected for being too dark, but I love how it looks with this one.  And for once I went easy on myself and just did a giant meander!  Fast and easy and perfect for a quilt that has so much going on. Scrappy quilts are some of my favorite quilts to make, and this one was done entirely without a plan. I just sewed each block depending on my mood.  I then immediately sewed it into its row.  Every ten days I got to give a little cheer and then sew the finished row to the rest of the time.  T...

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...

This beauty was from a massive quilt-along: sew all 100 blocks from Tula Pink's City Sampler Book in 100 days.  Starting on August 17, 2016 and ending on November 24, 2016, I sewed along with Angie at Gnome Angel and made one of these blocks daily. I decided I wanted to make my quilt scrappy but still have some cohesiveness, so I sewed each block with one animal novelty print and one solid.  This was easy at first, but there were days where it was a challenge!  I also used 100 distinct animal prints, which got a little touchy towards the end.  My "rule" was that I could use the same piece of fabric for multiple blocks as long as I was cutting different animals out each day. I finished strong, but wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the blocks, so I put them in a stack in a box and let them be.  But, then Angie started another round of the same quilt along challenge.  It seemed silly to make all the blocks again when I hadn't done anything wi...