BluePip Designs

What do you do with your scraps of quilt batting?  I buy my batting by the roll so I can always cut the perfect width of fabric, but the height is a different matter.  Sometimes the leftover is big enough for another project - if I'm lucky I can get a baby quilt from it, but mostly it goes to one of my mini quilts or cross-stitch minis.  But there comes a point when it's too small for even the smallest coaster. When that happens, it's time to cut the batting into squares and make tiny stuffed things!  I aim for roughly 1 inch squares and when the item is stuffed and finished, you can't tell that it was filled with batting scraps instead of fiberfill.  This lets me make custom-sized pillow inserts with ease (I think the largest size that I've made is about 18") or I can make small items like these Perfect Pocket Pillows that I made last month.  The best part is, I never run out of stuffing!  When my kids were small a...

I knew this wasn't going to be a big sewing quarter due to my son's graduation and then I was injured and spent the very first day of it in Urgent Care getting five stitches in my right index finger (not a sewing injury).  I took advantage of this time to get my sewing machine's annual maintenance done and learned that spring is a more popular time for that than fall is.  But I'm happy to report that today my finger is completely healed, my machine is home, my son has graduated, and I'm back on a "regular" summer sewing schedule! Quilt Tally WIP List to Start the Quarter:  9 WIP List to End the Quarter:  10 Active QAL Projects:  2 Untouched in 2026:  4 Finished in Q2: 2 quilts, 3 cross-stitch projects, 4 small projects Let's jump right in and look at how I did with my  Q2 Goals : 2026 Q2 Goal 1: Finish Blue Coin Done .  Once I pulled this back out, I was able to finish the quilting in a single afternoon and bind i...

I'm jumping in late with my Project Quilting project this week because I made a grave mistake: I finally basted my Blue Coin quilt on Monday.  It has been ready and waiting since before Christmas, and the fates finally aligned for me to get it done.  And once I have a freshly basted quilt, I cannot resist immediately starting to quilt it.  So all my sewing time this week was taken up by ditch-stitching the horizontal lines in it.  I didn't want to switch over from my walking foot to my piecing foot so I was "stuck". But the good news is, I finished the last horizontal line today (and the trimming) and was able to move on to my Project Quilting project!  I started this week with a brief refresher on what complimentary colors are and I absolutely fell in love with this paint-swatch demonstration of them (you can see it in the splash screen above if you don't want to click the link).  I then spent a lot of...

Can you believe it's been almost three months since I completed a quilt?  For me, that's a long time!  I'm pretty close though: I finished two tops last week and I'm working on the last block of a third right now.  The first top is bagged up and ready for the longarm quilter, but waiting so I can take the third top at the same time.  The second top is basted and waiting for me to send those two out so I can quilt it myself at home.  So there should be a flurry of finished quilts in September! I have also done a little non-quilt sewing.  My son asked me a few months ago if I could make him a dice bag for his new D12 collection, and I'm always happy to sew custom requests for my kids (but only my kids!).  I dusted off my favorite drawstring bag pattern , but, unfortunately, none of the fabric in my stash fit his vision, so he had to wait until I placed a new fabric order to pick out something that he liked.  I'm ...

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...

A short and sweet post today for this week's Project Quilting challenge, Follow Your Arrow !  I immediately thought of the humble mouse cursor and decided to center my project around that.  After playing with several different ideas, I decided to keep it very simple and do a single, stylized cursor. I almost never use the trackpad on my laptop, instead opting for this pink silent touch Bluetooth mouse.  All of the fabrics in this project came from my scrap bin - I started with the triangle fabric because they reminded me loosely of arrows and then chose fabric that went along with them.  For the eagle-eyed, yes, that dark green outline is the background fabric from my Rainbow Zephyr quilt ! I do have some thoughts about how I could improve the paper-piecing template I made if I were to make this again, but it's not bad for a first attempt.  At least I got all the triangles pointed in the same direction on the first ...

This week's Project Quilting challenge was a fun one: Birthstones !  I am lucky to be an April baby, which means my birthstone is the diamond, a fact I've always loved.  However, that did make this challenge a little more boring for me and, as a result, I ended up making a whole pile of projects! My journey this week actually started on Saturday night, before the challenge was released.  I had just learned that a co-worker was moving on and wanted to make her a little project to take with her.  I started paging through the Zero Waste Quilting book that I received for Christmas for ideas.  I have a terrible habit of getting quilting books and then never making anything from them, so I thought maybe I'd kill two birds with one stone and make a project from there.  These mug rugs immediately caught my eye as a simple project that fit the bill perfectly. I decided to a checkerboard design, with two rectangles...

It's hard to believe that we are already halfway through the Project Quilting challenges for the year.  Last year was my first year participating and I didn't really know what to expect.  This year I had more of a simple plan for myself: a list of small quilted items I wanted to make and the goal of using up full fabric scraps.  I've been doing pretty well with both of these! I made these cupcakes over a decade ago and they were very heavy played with. I'm so impressed that I found all six of them and that they are still in good shape! When I saw the Project Quilting Challenge 16.3 was "common blocks" several things immediately came to mind.  First, I would definitely be making a churn dash block (my favorite!).  Second, it should be a two-color quilt.  I've never done a true two-color quilt with only two fabrics and, well, as you can see, I still haven't.  Red and white or blue and white ar...

  Another round of Project Quilting is complete!  While I didn't start this week off by being trapped in an airport, the kids did have a bonus "cold day" off of school when the windchill was around 40 below in the morning.  If the next challenge could start off with just a nice, normal week, I'd really appreciate it!  For this challenge, however, I instantly knew what I was going to make: a fun string pillow like all the ones Molli Sparkles has been posting on Instagram this month.  I was really hoping one of the six challenges would match up with this and ombre felt like the perfect fit.  I polled my children on a color scheme and they collectively decided on "red to pink with a neon back." X is yelling "Ta-da!" if you can't hear him. I had a lot of fun making this pillow.  It was a small project, but I experimented with three new things.  First, I've never made my own ombre before.  Next, I don't...