BluePip Designs

In July, I did my first solo trunk show, and in the midst of gathering all the quilts and figuring out what I wanted to say, I realized it was absolutely, positively important that I made the Diamond Cuddlekiss quilt I had saved in my mock-up folder. This was important, because one of the themes of my presentation was that it's ok to not follow the pattern exactly (I'm terrible at following the pattern exactly).  And this quilt illustrated that perfectly.  I was recoloring the diagram in EQ8 and clicked wrong and ended up with this absolutely gorgeous secondary pattern.  When my son pulled the quilt out of the pile at the show, he accidentally held it up sideways at first, and the audience went wild - they loved how the sideways, recolored version looked like argyle.  I've added this version to my to-make list (I think it would be fun in Christmas colors!) - the versitility of this template keeps surprising me. If you want to make your...

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...

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...

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...

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...