BluePip Designs

The name of the game right now is "quick sewing" - I've given up most of my early morning sewing time in favor of bike rides before the day gets too hot, so most of my sewing has been in tiny chunks. Goal #1: Get my WIP List Under 10 WIP List at beginning of month: 17 WIP List at end of month: 17 Untouched in 2020: 4 Active QAL Projects: 2 Kid Projects: 2 Quilts Finished Wake Me Up, Watermelon (started April 2020) Panda Love (Pandamonium) (started July 2018) Block Battle Mini (started April 2020) Quilts Started (2) I started two scrappy quilts this month, both focused on large-scale stash busting!  I'm calling them  Blueberry Jam and Plaidish .  Both are intended to be quick finishes, not long-term residents of the WIP list (a girl can dream!).  I generally alternate cutting and piecing when I only have a short time to sew, but they also work as leaders and enders. You may be wondering "How is your WIP list still at 17 if you finished three quilts ...

One of my unofficial goals this year was to use my stash.  I make a lot of scrappy projects, but most of them just use tiny bits - I grab a 2.5" square from this fat quarter, then a 3.5" square from that one, oh, and maybe a 1.5" by 2.5" rectangle over here.  My fat quarter boxes are overflowing and let's face it, some of the fabrics in them have been around forever and are just feeling a little stale. I've been working hard ( Forgotten Fat Quarter , Watermelon Quilt ) at using up stash, but there's always more to get through.  Here are some of the recent projects I've undertaken to make room for new fabrics! First, Blueberry Jam. This is a pattern called  Peanut Butter Pinwheels  that I won earlier this year.  I've been using blues in my leaders and enders quilt, but two 2.5" squares doesn't make much of a dent.  So I'm grabbing all the cuts that are less than a fat eighth and cutting them into the squares for this.  The blocks are ...

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...

My Wake Me Up, Watermelon quilt is finished!  In a pre-COVID world, I totally would have brought it into Costco and thrown it over all the giant watermelon pallets for that perfect picture, but instead I brought one watermelon home and staged this cute picture. I don't think my family has ever been so excited for me to finish binding a quilt - I don't go grocery shopping all that often anymore so I bought the watermelon a few days before I was ready to take the pictures (it was good motivation!).  We also found out it's a lot harder than you'd think to get that perfect "bite picture". This quilt follows the Wake Me Up pattern , and was made during a quilt-along in April.  Except for piecing one of the white squares (I didn't have enough of the bear fabric), I faithfully followed the pattern.  I had to buy two more pink fabrics to fit my color scheme, but other than that it was completely from stash! I experimented a little with this one a...

Last month was all about touching old projects and making small bits of progress.  This month I want to make a big impact on my sewing room and WIP list by actually finishing things!  To that end, I have a mini goal and an official goal. My mini goal is to sew together all of the Sunshine blocks that I received in a swap earlier this year.  I have a plan of I want to do, I just need to take the time to put it together.  It involves sashing and cornerstones, which aren't my favorite things but I think in this quilt it will be worth the effort! My official goal goes back a little further, to a project that was sewn in 2018 and was a successful goal back in February : finish the panda quilt!  I had hoped that finishing the top would inspire me to quickly finish the whole thing, but it has fallen by the wayside and needs a little boost. I'm already on track to have one finished quilt this month (Wake Me Up, Watermelon is in the hand-binding stage),...

At the beginning of the month I took a look at my untouched WIP list , which really encouraged me to work on projects that I've already started.  I didn't finish anything, but I've done a good job evaluating what I'm already working on!  Lots of happy progress. Goal #1: Get my WIP List Under 10 WIP List at beginning of month: 17* WIP List at end of month: 17 Untouched in 2020: 4 Active QAL Projects: 2 Kid Projects: 2 Quilts Finished Catitude Pillow (Started April 2020) - The asterisk is gone and.a fully finished photo was added! Quilts Started None by me!  But my oldest was bored with all the rain we had Memorial Day weekend.  He's run out of ideas for my old felt scraps, so I gave him a basic primer on the iron, rotary cutter, and seam allowance and let him go crazy with all my solid scraps.  He's making an improv quilt!  The best part is it doesn't count against my WIP list because I'm completely hands-off on this project - available for...

At the beginning of this month, I took a walk through my WIP Walk of Shame - projects that haven't been touched yet this year.  I proudly stated that I would make progress on at least three of them. I started with a rainbow for my  Rainbow Blossom  quilt!  I printed this pattern (not available currently) back in March when Kristy sent an updated version of it, and I'm not sure why I took so long to piece it up.  It came together quickly and I enjoyed the chance to sew the curved pieces - my sewing life needs more curves! Making this rainbow did exactly what I was hoping to accomplish with this goal: I laid it out with the rest of the quilt, looked at the blocks left in the quilt along, and planned out the next six I need to put together.  This leaves one corner empty but I'll figure it out when I get to that point! After I did that, I couldn't get the orange feather out of my head.  So I grabbed my yellow and orange scrap bins and just ...

My quilt guild is doing a year-long challenge to create an "adventure quilt" - each month a different guild member designs a block.  Each designer is given a basic set of parameters and given free rein to design as desired, but it's a true adventure - we aren't working together on the blocks and have no idea what anyone after us is going to design.  My instructions were to include triangles and a double border for a block that finishes at twelve inches. The yellow and orange block above is my "star" block - the ones I made for my actual Adventure Quilt are shades of green, but those don't show off the pattern quite as well. Plus, it just looks better once it's all quilted up!  You can also see one of my test blocks for the center hiding in the back of my Watermelon Quilt . This pattern is currently only available to members of my guild.

I made three quilt goals for 2020 and one of them was to get my WIP list down to under ten projects. If you've been reading my  monthly recap posts , then you've probably noticed it's actually growing instead of shrinking!  I feel like I have three types of projects: ones that I start and then finish fairly quickly; quilt-alongs that are caught up but waiting for the next instruction; and projects that I lose interest in for whatever reason and then they sit for months or even years. The picture below shows the current state of my sewing room - five projects that I am actively working on: a quilt-along that ends this week; a quilt-along that lasts an entire year; a project that is just waiting for a little bit of finishing; my "sanity" project, simple patchwork; and a kid sewing project.  I anticipate finishing both the pillow and the watermelon quilt top this week (going right into quilting!) But half of the quilts on my list haven't even been touched...

A full month of staying home is behind us.  I've never had any desire to homeschool my kids, but I'm happy to say we made it through and they might have even learned something!  As for me, I coped by starting new quilt projects and keeping up on my quilt-alongs.  A few of these are waiting for the finishing touches in my en route package . Goal #1: Get my WIP List Under 10 WIP List at beginning of month: 16 WIP List at end of month: 17* Untouched in 2020: 8 Active QAL Projects: 4 Kid Projects: 2 Quilts Finished (2) 2018 Summer Sampler (Started May 2018) Catitude Pillow (Started April 2020) * - Just a tiny bit of finishing work needed! Quilts Started (2) Wake Me Up SAL - the classic lines in this one just really appealed to me.  I haven't done anything like this in a while and it was fun to work with big pieces of fabric for once.  My stash didn't have quite enough dark pinks, so my slow package contains the last two, plus a piece of low volum...