It's Good to Bee Queen! Stash Bee Tutorial

August is my month to be queen of Hive 3 at Stash Bee. I've been gathering ideas for a long while, planning for something quick and scrappy in a rainbow palette, but my husband made an eleventh hour request (yesterday afternoon) to minimize the number of colors, and to include his favorites (red and blue). Considering we're a military family, and he and I both liked this block designed with white contrast stripes, I decided to go all out American.  

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I've asked my hive mates to use a scrappy mix of bright, medium/cooler red and blue prints along with solid white or low volume white to create incomplete 12.5" blocks from HSTs. Below is a shot of the fabric pull I shared for inspiration, and I also whipped together a quick Pinterest board with more examples.

While looking for HST tutorials online to refer to, I found two excellent examples that show how to best square off your blocks as you go. The first HST tutorial from Karen at Sew Many Ways includes trimming with a square ruler, and the second HST tutorial from Amy Smart at Diary of a Quilter (who is vacationing in Germany at the moment - lucky her!) includes trimming with a right square triangle ruler made for that specific purpose. Both tutorials are for creating two-at-a-time HSTs, which is perfect for saving a little time while still allowing a lot of variety in fabrics so the blocks stay very scrappy.

If you're not feeling such a patriotic palette, look how fun these blocks are in rainbow! This photo is of "Radiate" - a beautiful quilt made by Amanda at The Cozy Pumpkin. I fell in love wth the design when I saw it a few months back. Now I'm excited that I'll finally have my own HST quilt, even if I had to compromise on my colors ; )

If you'd like to create something similar, here's a quick how to for the blocks...

For each 12" finished block, you'll need:
          (8) 4" squares of saturated color fabrics   &   (8) 4" squares of white/low volume

Begin by pairing (8) sets of 4" squares together matching saturated with white/LV following the two-at-a-time HST method to create (16) 3.5" squares.

Then sew resulting (16) 3.5" squares together to create (4) 6.5" squares similar to the dark/light pattern example below. 

I asked my bee mates to stop here because I want to mix their smaller block segments in with mine and get as scrappy a look as possible before assembling. If you're working on them for yourself, you'll sew together the (4) 6.5" squares to get (1) 12.5" unfinished/12" finished block. I love that with these blocks, you can play around with layouts to create simple diagonal stripes from corner to corner, or "arrows" >> pointing in one direction or in opposing rows, or create a focal diamond and work out from it. Tons of design possibilities!

Are you in a bee? What block have you chosen or really loved creating for a bee mate?

~ Sarah

Linking up with Fabric Frenzy Friday