BluePip Designs

I went to a baby shower yesterday, which means today I can share the first of the three baby quilts I am making this fall ! This quilt was made with a layer cake of Nature's Sketchbook by Elena Amo - the soft florals and mushrooms fit the mama's vibe perfectly.  I supplemented this with a few animal prints leftover from the Twilight Star quilt I made last year that belongs to this baby's cousin.  I hope they don't mind that their quilts overlap a little bit! I adapted the Scattered Squares pattern by Missouri Star Company to be baby sized - I like how this pattern moves a lot but the fabric is still the star. The back of the quilt is a sweet teddy bear print to give it a "baby" feel and the binding is one of the brown prints from the line.  I quilted it myself in a meander pattern. Now we just have to wait for baby to arrive to see if they like it!

While finishing a quilt is always a happy day, finishing a quilt that has been sitting for a long time is an extra happy day!  Under the Sea is a fully paper-pieced quilt.  The pattern was designed by Kristy at Quiet Play and I started it when she first released it as a monthly quilt along back in February 2023.  Over time, I fell behind - sometimes when I'm waiting for the next block of a QAL to be released I start something else and don't feel like immediately transitioning back when it finally arrives. This year, however, I've been on a real "clean up my WIP list" kick so I decided that before I started any new QAL project I had to make a block for an old QAL quilt.  And because I like starting new projects, that was all I needed to get it done.  I had a set of solid colors that I used to make all of the blocks, and most of the print fabrics are from Kristy's fabric lines .  The background is Spotted by Zen Chic , but...

Surprise!  I made a scrap quilt that isn't blue-themed! And, yup, the cat's out of the bag: I'm a Packer fan!  I think my dad thought I was joking when I said that the reason for my trip back home was to take quilt photos, but I was completely serious.  In fact, there's more: It's a two-sided quilt!  I actually finished this quilt back in March, but knew the photos needed to be taken in Green Bay and this was the first time since then that I've been back.  It was almost magical - the day was so windy, but each time my son held up the quilt for a photograph, the wind would die down and it would hang perfectly straight.  It's like the quilt wanted to be photographed at Lambeau!   I loved the Octadot pattern when it was released in October 2025, but there was a small problem: I had told myself I wasn't allowed to start a new quilt until I finished a few quilts from my WIP list.  But it was one of...

Another summer is drawing to a close, and this year I actually finished my summer quilting project before it ended.  Meet Oh, Granny ! I wasn't actually looking for a new quilt to make, but I saw an in-progess Oh, Granny  quilt on BlueSky and it was love at first sight.  I've been in love with simple square quilts since I made my postage stamp quilt and this fit the bill perfectly. As with all my scrappy quilts, I had some self-imposed rules to keep the quilt cohesive: The third round of each block was made with solid fabrics.  I choose three cool colors and three warm colors and made five blocks with each color scheme. The color of the center square was determined by the color of the solid fabrics. The other two rings could be any colors, but these were the opposite (warm/cool) of the solid fabrics. The final layout is a checkerboard of cool and warm blocks (determined by ...

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...

Most of my sewing room decluttering attempts involve making scrappy quilts, but the quilt I'm making today has a slightly different story: yardage that was specifically set aside for a project.  Two years ago, I was looking for something in my sewing room and came across a bag with some fabric scraps and the pattern for the first quilt I ever made .  The feature fabric in that first quilt was elephant-themed and I instantly decided it would be fun to make that quilt again with some current elephant fabric.  So I hopped online and placed an order for some elephant and coordinating fabric.  But when it came, I was working on another project and it got placed in a bag, labeled, and set aside.  Fast forward to now when that fabric finally became a quilt! The timeline for the two quilts is this: June 2011: I made the original quilt (with fabric from Joann's!) June 18, 2024: I ordered the fabric for the updated quilt June 20, 2026: I s...

I enjoyed my finished  Blue Four Patch quilt so much that I wanted to start another leaders-and-enders quilt immediately after finishing it.  My blue scrap drawer was still overflowing (and to be honest, probably will be forever because it's my favorite color) so I knew the next project would feature blue as well.  I decided to pair the blue scraps with my also overflowing white scrap drawer to create a coin quilt.  A coin quilt is something that has been on my quilty bucket list for a long time, but felt kind of boring to make as my "featured project", which means it was perfect for some background sewing! For me, a scrappy quilt works better if there are a couple of rules when I'm piecing it together.  Because I wanted something that I could finish in less than seven years, I needed more lax rules that I had in my previous leaders-and-enders quilt so I settled on four: Only use blues that read as blue - avoid...

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...