WIPS-B-GONE 2026

It's that time of year - the annual WIPS-B-GONE challenge is open for registration! This is the 6th year for the free WIP-finishing challenge, and I'm excited to help motivate you to finish some long-standing projects (and to finish some myself!) 😊

What is WIPS-B-GONE?

It's two months to focus on making progress on your quilty works-in-progress (WIPs) with friends and some extra support from me. The challenge starts October 1st and runs until the end of November, so we'll have 61 days to work on those projects that have been sitting unfinished for too long.

Whether you have a collection of quilt blocks cut out, but not sewn together, or a stash of blocks finished, but not sewn into a quilt top, or a pile of quilt tops that need quilting, it's so much easier to use, display, or gift a quilt that's finished, so let's move some of them across that finish line!

Extra support to make it easier

When you sign up for the WIPS-B-GONE challenge, you'll get a link to download:

• a project list, so you can see at a glance which projects you plan to work on and check them off as you finish them
• a daily tracker (there are 3 to choose from!), so you can colour in an icon for each day you work on a WIP. The daily trackers are consistently one of the favourite parts of the challenge every year 😊
• graphics you can share on social media to show you're participating in the challenge and to invite your quilty friends to join us, too! The more, the merrier!

A daily tracker from a previous year

Monday Motivation

Along with the downloads, you'll also receive Monday Motivation emails all through the challenge to help you stay on track. Sticking with something for 61 days can be a challenge, and I hope these emails will be the extra dose of motivation you need to keep you going.

Community

If you're on social media, you can post your progress and use the hashtag #wipsbgone2026 so other participants can find your post and cheer you on. A challenge is more fun when you're doing it with friends!

Of course, you don't have to share on social media to take part in the challenge. Simply download your daily tracker, choose some WIPs, and make a little progress on them each day.

Finished the quilt top during WIPS-B-GONE 2024 - I'll still be quilting it this year

Are you in?

If you want to finish some quilts this fall, join us for WIPS-B-GONE 2026!

Disco Squares Quilt

 In my ongoing quest to blog the quilts I've finished, but not yet shared, I'm happy to finally share Disco Squares with you!

Disco Squares was the Stash Artists pattern back in November. When I finished making it, we had a run of bad weather, so Paul and I were only able to sneak out one afternoon between rain showers to snap a quick picture for the pattern cover before it was released to the members. We had to be very careful the quilt didn't touch the wet, muddy ground and laying it down anywhere was definitely not an option. I figured it was no big deal, I'd just get the pictures for a blog post the next chance we had...and then promptly set it aside and didn't get around to taking those pictures until last month. Better late than never, right?

I loved digging through my scraps for the pinks, teals, and blues. Some of the black pieces came from my scraps, too, but I don't think I had enough to cut all of the black from scraps. That's one of the downfalls of waiting so long to write the post, I forget some of the details of the making. 

I do remember that I bought the cream solid because I wanted something softer than white. Cream isn't a colour I use a lot in my quilts, though I'm actually using it right now for the background of another quilt that will also be a Stash Artists pattern.

Finding enough blues was no problem, of course! Nothing seems to ever empty my blue scrap basket, or even get it down to just full, rather than overflowing 😅 I'm not complaining, though. Making scrappy blue quilts always makes me happy, so I'd probably be very sad if I ever ran out of blue scraps.

When it came time for the quilting, I decided to go bold and use bright pink thread (Aurifil 2530). I quilted a meandering spiral, intentionally not traveling directly over the same path in and out of the spiral. I love the randomly doubled look that gives the spiral. With the same cream solid on the back, the pink quilting shows up beautifully.

The day we went to the beach for this photo shoot was a little windier than is ideal for quilt pictures, so I caught this shot of the quilt trying to escape!

And here's the picture I was trying to get. I do love a quilt picture with the ocean in the background!

And pictures of quilts laid out on the beach rocks. Really, I just love any excuse to go to the beach!

The binding is scrappy, but it's all teals that are pretty similar, so it looks like it's one fabric until you get up close.

When we had a team of guys putting mini split heat pumps in the house in June, one of them spotted Disco Squares sticking out of a stack of quilts and commented that he really liked the colours in it. I do, too! Pink and blue together can sometimes feel childish, like a gender reveal or something, but I feel like I avoided that here by adding the black and cream. And because there aren't a lot of pastels, the combination of pinks, blues, and teals feels like it has a lot of energy.

Want to make your own Disco Squares quilt? Come join us in Stash Artists! Stash Artists is for quilters who want to use the fabric they already own, and new members get access to the Disco Squares pattern as soon as they join, along with the full pattern library of scrappy and stash-friendly patterns. There are virtual sew days, too, and we'd love to have you join us!

I'm still finding it hard to balance my work as a virtual assistant (which is all on the computer), my pattern business, (which requires a lot of computer work), and blogging (which obviously also has to be done on a computer), without feeling like I'm spending all day looking at a screen. I find it helps to do something active in between sessions on the computer, or to do some sewing. I still have a few more finished quilts to share, so I'm going to make it my fall project to try to get caught up 😊  Hopefully I'll be back next week with another one!

Friendly Wave Quilted Cushion

Sometimes vague ideas stay in my head for a long time before I figure out how I can translate the thought into a quilt design. This little cushion is one example of that, so I'm excited that now I get to mark it as a finish. Meet Friendly Wave, the Stash Artists Mini of the Month pattern for August.

I've been wanting to make something with a whale on it for years. Then, when I was first thinking about doing a Mini of the Month series in the Stash Artists membership for 2026, I made a list of all the possible themes/ideas those minis could explore and I added 'a whale quilt' to the list. That rattled around for a while before the idea of a strippy background made the whole thing start coming together.

If you want to make a Friendly Wave cushion, too, join us in Stash Artists! When you join, you'll get access to the full library of scrappy and stash-friendly patterns, including Friendly Wave and so many more.

Stitching my background together meant I could use some of the long strips of blue fabric that have been trimmed off quilt backs after quilting. Nowhere near all of them, of course, but it was a great way to use up some of them! I cut my strips anywhere from ¾" to 1 ¼" so I could get the maximum number of scrappy strips into my 16" cushion.

I probably should have used slightly lighter blues for the 'water' portion of the cushion, to help the whale stand out a little better, but I didn't think of that until after it was all pieced. When choosing the fabrics, I was more focused on making sure there was a lot of contrast between the water and the sky, so I had a moment of panic when I realized the dark grey tone-on-tone print I wanted to use for the whale was going to disappear more than I wanted. Fortunately, using lighter grey thread (Aurifil 2600) to quilt/stitch down the edge of the appliqué made it a lot more visible.

Real whale flukes (that's the proper name for their tails) have lots of bumps and ridges along the edge, so I replicated that as well as I could without making it too hard to cut out. I'm really pleased with the effect!

As usual, I had fun with the quilting. First, I stitched all around the whale several times to create a nice, thick line. When I'm stitching around appliqué shapes like this, I intentionally don't try to stitch exactly on top of the previous lines. That way the wobbles end up looking like they were supposed to happen, because they were! I don't know about you, but I could never stitch perfectly around an outline even once, let alone three times, so making the wobbles an intentional part of the design makes the process a lot more relaxing.

After the whale was stitched, I used the same Aurifil 2600 to stitch some splash detail where the tail is coming out of the water. I pretty much just scribbled elongated, overlapping figure-eights until it looked right.

For the water, I used Aurifil 2785 to quilt random, overlapping, wavy lines from side to side. This took the most time, but still didn't take long since it's such a small piece.

The clouds in the sky portion were Paul's idea. Random is hard! Did I quilt enough clouds? Are they close enough...far apart enough...properly cloud-shaped? 😅 After quilting a few, I told myself they were good enough and left it at that!

I put my cushion together with an envelope backing, which is the only method I've ever used for a cushion. For some reason, I can never remember which way to layer the pieces so the backing piece on the outside will be the one on the top, and this time I got it wrong. It looks so weird to me that the outside piece is on the bottom, like the cushion is upside down. It doesn't bother me enough that I took it apart to redo it, though!

A whale cushion definitely has to go to the beach for its photo shoot! Unfortunately, no real whales came to visit while we were there.

And thanks to Yvonne of Quilting Jetgirl, I've been trying to remember to take pictures of myself with my makes more often. The sun was really bright, so I'm squinting, but here's me and my Friendly Wave cushion 😊

We're not 'cushions on the couch' people, which is why I rarely make cushions. But at Christmas I had my Stay Cozy cushion displayed in our entryway, at the base of this table I made in shop class in junior high. After the Christmas decorations were put away, I decided the space needed a cushion for the rest of the year, too, and now Friendly Wave looks perfect there.

Dad carved the fabulous wood sprite sitting on the table. He also named this pattern, after I put a couple of options in the family group chat asking for opinions and he immediately chimed in with Friendly Wave. Apparently I need to get his help naming patterns more often!

Remember, you can join us in Stash Artists to get the Friendly Wave pattern and lots of other scrappy, stash-friendly patterns, along with monthly sewing sessions and more. We'd love to have you join us!