Bags and Baskets

 I had yardage of a heavyweight cotton fabric I bought from IKEA. I was planning on making a quilt out of it but after making one coverlet from heavyweight IKEA fabric, I didn’t want to make another.

Unlike a lot of my fellow quilters, I’m not a bag maker. I have a lot of bags already. Now one type of bag I do need more of are grocery bags.  I like big, canvas bags like the boat tote made by L.L. Bean. At first I tried looking for a boat tote pattern with not much luck. Then last week, Amy Smart posted an Easter basket pattern on her blog Diary of a Quilter and the Riley Blake blog. I took her pattern and enlarged it….. a lot. Here is the resulting bag.

How big is it? Each of those trees is nine inches wide.

Here it is in comparison to the bag my sister got me from Whole Foods.

I lined it with this khaki cotton/poly blend that I had in my stash.

 Also had to make sure that the key fob worked.

So I still had more of this fabric. What to do now? My friend Ali made a cute fabric basket at our retreat last summer. She got the pattern from the BirchFabric blog.

For the lining I used this plaid that I had in my stash.

I made these three baskets.

They also nest nicely.

I made another large basket just to use up more of this fabric. Now I need to figure out what to do with the rest of the scraps.