Wonderful Wednesday - Basket Season

Welcome to another edition of Wonderful Wednesday!!  Well... I missed Wednesday by about 16 hours.  Oops!

Anyway...

My blog friend, Fiona, at Bubzrugz got me started on making these baskets early this year.  It was her project for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge and I felt inspired to start my own collection with this Patriotic version:

She had kindly posted a TUTORIAL just for that purpose.  Thank you, Fiona!  Using the "quilt as you go" method was interesting and I do like trying new-to-mt techniques.  With that being said, I believe that I actually prefer to make a quilt sandwich of "made" fabric over building the fabric on a base of batting.  I appreciate the idea of QAYG, as described in the tutorial, but found that I don't really enjoy that process very much.

Anyway...

My thought was to make baskets for my under-served fabric collections.  These are the ones that I have lots of, but they either don't have their own baskets, like the LIGHT NEUTRALS:

 Or... They have a basket that no longer contains them, like the Aqua/Turquoise scraps:

Yes, I posted these before, but I thought the deserved a special "shout out" just for them.  Same with the smaller version that I moved to after these were done.

For the smaller sized baskets, I adapted THIS tutorial from Christina Cameli.  I didn't use a separate lining fabric and instead of a fold-over finish, I added a regular binding - applied in the round, like you would finish a sleeve.

NOTE:  For the purpose of this section of the post the term "basket" will also be referred to as "yarn bowl" or "yarn bowl" basket.  Said baskets will be made for my knitting friends, hence the name change.

This pink one was the first "yarn bowl" basket to be made:

Followed closely by a purple one, which started off well enough:

However, something happened while quilting:

A thread snapped and then the back ended up looking like this:

SEW...

I started over and moved right along to the "Sumo Diaper" stage:

Straight to a finish:

Next up was one made from the leftovers of my recent Aqua/Turquoise Scrap Basket shown at the top of this post:

I couldn't decide which side I liked best:

Pieced... or plain:

A spotty dotty "yarn bowl" basket...

Was followed by the woman in red:

This photo was taken at my Weekly Quilt Group:

It includes the final to "yarn bowls" that I made:

Later, I took a photo of an overly excited Miss Teal:

Along with an "oh-that's-SEW-sweet" photo of Miss Pink:

Before these, Mrs. Purple accepted delivery, but neglected to smile for the camera:

After all of those, Ms. Multicolored was thrilled with her dots:

That only leaves the Lady in Red:

PHOTO CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE!!!

All in all, I would say that this was an extremely successful project.  I had a great time, used up some fabric scraps, practiced my free motion quilting, AND the recipients LOVE their gifts.  Yep!  That was a REALLY good project.  :o))

(So good that I might do it again... in miniature.)

Until next time...
It's basket season, ya'll!!!