Bee Cross Stitch – Kaleidoscope of Blues

Hello quilty friends, Rachel here from Stitch With Rachel, and today I am sharing an opitical illusion quilt with you. Although this quilt contains a circle pattern, there are no curved pieces involved so it is a really easy construction.

Scrappy Fabric Selection

For this project I have chosen to use a selection of fabrics from the Bee Cross Stitch and Bee Backgrounds collection by Lori Holt. I selected 5 prints from the blue and green hues, some were very close in colour but this gives the project a scrappy feel.

This would be a great project to use your scraps from a single colour family.

Foundation Paper Piecing

Believe it or not, this quilt is made from a single block!
It is the use of clever colour placement which makes the pattern that you see. For this quilt I purchased a Foundation Paper Piecing pattern, which can be found here, I printed the pattern on my home printer using standard copy paper.

Each block is constructed in two halves and then joined together. I have used 5 coloured fabrics so it would have been a challenge to avoid two of the same fabrics next to each other, therefore this does happen at several points across the quilt. However, because of the striking design, you can hardly notice.

If you recreate this quilt, you really can go wild and mix in lots of different fabrics… Maybe I will even make another one at some point!

I really enjoy using a variety of low volume prints for the background fabrics. When you look at the quilt up close, they add some interest but from afar they all look the same. These Lori Holt Bee Background fabrics were great for that, I selected those with a teal undertone.

Removing the papers

With Foundation Paper Piecing, you stitch through the paper, so you will need to remove the papers once everything is sewn together. So let me give you some tips to make this easier…

Reduce your stitch length.
This will make your stitches closer together and therefore perforate the paper more.
Use a bigger needle
This will mean that the needle makes bigger holes in the paper, and is so much easier to remove the papers.

You can watch me make this quilt and get some more helpful construction tips over on my Youtube Channel

I enjoyed making and sharing this quilt with you.

Be sure to follow me on social media to see the fully finished quilt, however I cannot guarantee when that will be as I am often distracted with beautiful new fabrics!

Happy Quilting
Rachel x