BluePip Designs

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...

It's noon on December 31st, and I am done crafting for the year.  My hobbies expanded yet again this year, but this time it wasn't a new craft, it was going to the movies!  I love the peace and quiet of the dark theater and forcing myself to sit still and focus solely on the screen so much that I went 101 times.  Luckily, I still found the time to produce many lovely quilts and assorted small projects.  2026 is bringing big changes to the BluePip house - my oldest teenager is turning 18 and graduating from high school this spring!  I'm not sure I'm ready to be the "parent of an adult", but I also know that I don't have a choice in the matter.  But before all that goes down, let's take one final look back at 2025. Quilts Started in 2025:  16 Quilts Finished in 2025:  20 WIP List on January 1:  13 WIP List on December 31:  9 Number of current, active QAL projects:  0 (But changing soon!) Number of WIPs without any progress:...

This is a 2-for-1 blog post: two full-size Floppy quilts in one blog post! Each quilt features one of the quilt blocks in the Floppy pattern, so together they show off the whole thing. I designed the 3.5 Inch Floppy quilt block first, and it was the first quilt I made too.  I liked how the the floral pattern looked on my small test block , so I decided I wanted to continue with that theme for my full-sized quilt.  The block is jelly roll friendly, so I grabbed a junior jelly roll of Love, Lily by April Rosenthal and got started.   I skipped the white strips because they blended in too well with the labels (this amazing rainbow stripe that took me right back to the 1980s) and ended up with 15 blocks.  This wasn't enough for a full-size throw quilt, so I cut some squares from a coordinating fabric and made a checkerboard quilt.  Turns out, there's...