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...

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...

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...

Today I am sharing a tutorial for the fusion of my two favorite crafty hobbies: quilting and cross-stitch! The popular way to display cross-stitch pieces is to put them up in hoops, but as a quilter I like to have all my loose ends tied up and hidden away forever. I also have a system for displaying mini quilts in my house already and it's easier to switch out the cross-stitch pieces when they are actually tiny quilts. This tutorial is generalized so that it can be used with any size cross-stitch piece.  It also gives plenty of options for customizing your mini quilt for the perfect finish.  Please read through the entire tutorial once before beginning. Supply List A finished cross-stitch piece.  This method of finishing works best with smaller pieces (less than 7x7), unless you are planning on putting quilting lines through the cross-stitch part.  I've done this with larger pieces and they end up sagging in the middle until I add extra reinforcement. A piece ...

After a long summer of slow stitching, I decided I needed to end the summer with a finished quilt. When I saw the new set of animal ghost patterns from Quiet Play , I knew I had found my project. And here he is, my newest mini quilt, Ghost Duck! We have many small duck toys in our home, so the duck was the logical choice for my little ghost. I pieced the entire top from scraps during a Zoom quilt guild meeting and then finished it up over the next few days. The quilting is done with white lines that blend in on the ghost and show up a little bit on the background, and the eyes are unquilted to give them more punch. The binding matches the background fabric. I could have faced the project, but decided that this worked well enough. The backing is what is left from the binding on my other duck quilt , which is a nice bit of full-circle fabric usage. And that's it! A sweet, fast finish to end my summer, and a new decoration for Hallowe...

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 ...