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.

Oh How I Hate Ohio State, but made a quilt in their colors

This quilt was probably made in 1982 or 1983. I made it for Barbie and Dave (pictured, I'm on the right) and they were married February 27, 1982. Only for these two would I have made a quilt in scarlet and gray. I grew up outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, so I bleed maize and blue.

I’m pretty sure that this is not an official pattern like Trip Around the World. I just cut out the pieces (still using a cardboard template) and laid the pieces out on the guest bed.  Sewed it together and then quilted it using the tie method. Instead of using quilt binding, I binded it using the method where the backing is big enough so that it can be folded over to become the binding.

If you look carefully, there is one square that it not like the others. I ran out of that fabric. One square short! My mother suggested I do a cross-stitch square to personalize it for Barbie and Dave.

A couple years later, I made a baby quilt for their son John. I went to buy more fabric, but couldn’t find the fabric or even the colors to go with this quilt. It was my first lesson that quilt fabrics change just like clothing styles.

My First Quilt

This is my first quilt. I bought a bag of scrap fabric from the local quilt/cross-stitch store at the sidewalk sales. I then cut 4 ½ inch squares. This was before rotary cutters and mats. I used a template made out of cardboard.

I had no clue about a pattern. We owned a general craft book with a section on quilting. The closest they had to a scrap quilt was a crazy quilt. My mother tried to be helpful, but it still just looks like a bunch of squares sewed together.

After the quilt top was finished, time to quilt it. That part I knew I wanted to do tie quilting. I did not have the patience to hand quilt it. (The craft book only had two options for quilting – tie or hand quilt). So now what? A friend of my mom’s had made a few quilts. She came over and taught me how to make a quilt sandwich with the batting and the backing. She lent us her quilt frame and I started tying with some white (probably acrylic) yarn.

Finally it was time to do the binding. I used Wrights double-folded quilt binding. I pinned it on and put it on my mom’s sewing machine. It puckered. I tore it out and basted it on. It puckered. (My mom and I didn’t know about walking feet). I ended up living with the puckering.

I have no idea why I decided to make a quilt. My mother sewed clothes. My 4-H instructor didn’t make quilts. Maybe I wanted to try something new that no one of my acquaintances were doing. Needless to say, this little quilt set me on my current path.