BluePip Designs

What a month! It was all about the quilt-alongs and boy did they keep me busy!  I started the month with two tops ready for assembly and one top that needed a back, and ended the month with two finished quilts and one that is half-quilted.  I'd been feeling like I didn't have very many finishes this year and that's certainly not the case anymore! Quilt Tally WIP List at beginning of month: 12 WIP List at end of month: 11 Untouched in 2022: 5 Active QAL Projects: 1 Quilts Finished Macaron Mystery Quilt (October 2021) Blue Zephyr (February 2022) Quilts Started Meeple Pillow - Test project for my 6" Meeple blocks. Quilt Progress (5 WIPs touched) Harry Potter POD - I almost didn't have a block for this month, but then I decided I wasn't going to skip two months in a row.  Instead of making one of the more complicated blocks for the sides of the bookcase, I made this mug of Butterbeer, which Harry has plopped down on top of the bookcase bef...

A big THANK YOU to everyone who sewed along with me on this quilt-along.  I get a thrill every time you share your work with me - it's so exciting to see what you make with my patterns!  I'm going to kick off the parade with my quilt-along version of Zephyr - the fourth one I've made.  This pattern has been working hard to clear out my stash, but there's still plenty of fabric in there! The back of the quilt is the Stonehenge Flannel wideback in Navy (no longer available from the website I bought it from) - once I started backing quilts in flannel there was no looking back.  My family loves these extra-heavy, extra warm quilts.  The quilting pantograph is Woven Wind, done by Lauren at Tekstil Crave ; it's the same quilting I had done on the original Zephyr and still a favorite!  The binding is a navy solid that I found in my stash; probably a Kona although it wasn't labeled. And now for the exciting part of the post - your Zephyrs! My mother-in-law, ...

This week we are sewing our finished blocks into rows and then a quilt top!  This is the final and easiest part of assembly - it's just square blocks being sewn together into rows.  All the sashing and on-point blocks you see are just a clever illusion (my Chalk Stars quilt is constructed in the same way)!  Here's an expanded diagram from last week's post:  Step three is the only place in the entire quilt where it matters how you press your seams - press towards the blocks with the horizontal rows.  This will ensure that your blocks nest when you are sewing the rows together.  Sew all the blocks in each row together, then sew the rows together and your Zephyr quilt top is done! I can't wait to see your finished quilts!  I want to make sure everyone has time to finish and photograph their quilt tops, so I am moving the quilt parade from next Sunday to Thursday, April 28th.  Please send me a photo of your finished quilt by T...

It's time to start assembling your Zephyr quilt!  Gather up all those rails you've made and start laying them out.  The pattern has several pages that explain how to put the rails together, but I find it easier to look at my coloring sheet (or the cover quilt if you are doing the rainbow throw) and go from there. Start with the first full pinwheel in the upper left corner and arrange the rails so that the triangles are on the outside and the rectangles are on the inside - be careful that your directional prints are all pointing in the same direction!  This pinwheel looked correct when I first laid it out, but after I started sewing my rail pairs together I noticed the rails weren't all oriented the same way.  I'm probably the only person who would notice this in the finished quilt, but since I had gone through the effort of making one rail in each direction I did get out the seam ripper and fix it. I had a few rail sets...

The list for March looks short, but I was busy!  I made big progress on fewer projects.  Two of my quilt-along quilts are now finished tops and hopefully one more will be a top by the end of the weekend.  I didn't sew a Harry Potter block or assemble a postage stamp row, but with all those tops assembled there will be plenty of time to catch up in April.  My favorite part of the month was the ability to take outdoor photos again, even if I was fighting the wind most of the time! Quilt Tally WIP List at beginning of month: 14 WIP List at end of month: 12 Untouched in 2022: 5 Active QAL Projects: 3 Quilts Finished Desert Cove (February 2022) Meeple Mini Quilt (February 2022) Quilts Started None. Quilt Progress (5 WIPs touched) Blue Zephyr - My quilt-along Zephyr has reached the assembly stage; I've got all my rails made and I'm ready to put it all together! One, Two, Tree - Double duty on this one! First, I pieced all my tree scraps into an abbrevi...

It's time to move onto our smaller scraps!  This part goes much faster because you only have to make two rails from each scrap.  Take the number of half scrap sets needed and divide by two; that's the number of half scrap sets you need to sew this week.  Next week you'll be sewing the remainder of the half scrap sets as well as any quarter scrap sets your layout requires. The only tricky thing about sewing the half scrap sets is sewing them out of directional fabric.  Cut one of your background fabric squares in half diagonally, then use as a template for cutting your colorful triangles - the diagonals need to go in opposite directions. Place the background fabric triangles on your scrap fabric so one diagonal runs left-to-right and the other runs right-to-left, then cut the scrap along the diagonal of the triangle.  The rectangle pieces also need to be cut in the opposite directions so everything lines up when the rails are sewn together. Then you can s...

Hello!  I'm back again after a week off from blogging (but not sewing!).  I hope everyone has been enjoying sewing their full scrap sets together.  I got through all my "almost" fat quarters of blue and managed to use 11 of them up completely!  I was not real strict with what was "light" and what was "dark" - they are sorted in the photo below but some of them really could go either way. I was more choosy with my purple rails, trying to pick out purples that read more blue.  I also debated as to whether or not I actually wanted to make the brown rails.  The only solution, of course, was to make one set of brown blocks and then lay them out with the blue blocks.  After seeing them together, I knew they belonged (and yes, that's the brown fabric from the original  Bernie's Mittens quilt !) I'm enjoying watching everyone's rails come together on Instagram.  My mother-in-law is sewing along as well, and she has her whole top completed!...

 Good morning!  Today I am sharing my Desert Cove baby quilt! Desert Cove is my first non-mini quilt "start-to-finish" 2022 project; almost all of my sewing so far this year has been long-term projects and quilt-alongs so nothing is getting finished!  This is a brand-new pattern, and while there was a quilt-along, I basically just started sewing it together and didn't stop.  I used a junior jelly roll from my stash, along with a few stray jolly bars to fill in after I made a cutting error and didn't have enough of the jelly roll to finish the entire top.  The only change I made from the written pattern was to add a border around the outside - I'm not normally a border person but this quilt seemed to be asking for one. I have an informal year-long goal to not make any new scraps, so the mis-cut jelly roll pieces got turned into a piano-key stripe for the back of my quilt.  Anything left over after that was cut into 2" squares for my postage stamp project . ...

Welcome! Who is ready to sew at last?  Me!!   Last week's post went over cutting both your background and feature fabrics and now we are going to start putting together our rails! This isn't a step-by-step tutorial; instead it's just some tips and tricks to help you out. We are working with the full scrap sets this week, which means each scrap is going to make four rails, or one complete pinwheel.  There are two questions to consider: how many scraps should I be sewing into rails and how do I decide which scraps to sew with this week? How many scraps should I sew into rails each week?   The quilt-along is allowing three weeks for sewing the full scrap sets, so roughly one-third of the needed scraps each week: Baby/Throw: 4 this week; 3 each of the next two weeks Twin: 12 each week Queen: 8 each week King: 12 this week; 10 each of the next two weeks How do I decide the order of scraps to sew each week?   This is c...

A short but busy month.  I was busy putting together my own quilt-along, but a new pattern on Instagram caught my eye and I had to jump into its quilt-along as well.  Add that to the two quilt-alongs I already had in progress and my year-long postage stamp project and I spent plenty of time working on plenty of different projects!  I've only had two finishes so far in 2022 and I'm looking to double that number in the next month. Quilt Tally WIP List at beginning of month: 11 WIP List at end of month: 14 Untouched in 2022: 5 Active QAL Projects: 4 Quilts Finished None. Quilts Started Blue Zephyr - My newest version of Zephyr to go along with the quilt-along I am hosting. Desert Cove - My new quilt-along project.  I got the top pieced and basted quickly, but I haven't had time to sit down and quilt it.  It will be done soon though - I need the pins back to baste my One Tw...