Quilters Big Tote with Bee Backgrounds and Bee Cross Stitch

Hi fellow makers, it’s Luci from Sea Garden Sewing! Today I’m sharing a tote I made from Minki Kim‘s Quilter’s Big Tote pattern. I love to have a splash of color in my makes, but I’m also a big fan of low volumes as well! For my tote, I decided to mix fabrics from the Bee Backgrounds and Bee Cross Stitch lines by Lori Holt.

I’ve recently been bitten by the Foundation Paper Piecing (FPP) bug, and decided on incorporating the Kaleidoscope FPP block by A Spoonful of Sugar into my bag panels. One block is nice to look at, but the real fun is watching the secondary pattern emerge when joining blocks together.

I used the cheery yellow Stitched Flower print from Bee Basics as the interior fabric for my bag- it reminded me of sunshine! To keep the focus on the FPP and fabrics, I chose to quilt a simple 1″ diagonal grid.

Because I like to use a water-soluble marker for marking my grid lines, my bag needed a quick rinse before its photoshoot.

Here’s the completed bag!

Though the color/fabric placement in this bag looks random, I actually had to spend a lot of time making sure that I didn’t have any like colors/prints touching.

This project definitely deserved the adornment of a gifted ‘Good Things Take Time‘ sewing label by Jen Hewett. The tote has 30 Kaleidoscope blocks, which each finished at 4″ square.

I hope you enjoyed my Quilters Big Tote with Bee Backgrounds and Bee Cross Stitch! If you’d like to follow along with more of my quilting adventures, you can follow me on Instagram at @SeaGardenSewing.