The First Baskets Quilt

I'd wanted to make a basket quilt for a long time.  I had saved the cover of an old McCall's quilting magazine -- it featured a yellow basket quilt.  I thought someday I might make it.  Meanwhile, I fell in love with a certain black-background print that I discovered in Old Country Store.  I'd bought an unspecified amount and also picked out some coordinates.

My on-line quilting group, Fat Quarters, was doing a little project then where during our birthday month, we would send out some fabric to everyone participant with some instructions, vague or specific, of what was to be done.  I found this basket block, cut some of the black and some of the coordinates and picked out a background and cut some of that and asked for these blocks.  Turned out that I'd not sent quite enough background fabric to some of the participants, and they offered to fill in from similar stash.  I delighted in that idea.  When the blocks came back, I needed to make some more, and deliberately used some similars in parts of some of the blocks.  This was my first basket quilt to be assembled, my first piano key border.

I decided that hand-quilting was the way to go for this special quilt, and asked my then machine quilter to machine baste it for me.  I started the hand quilting about three years ago,  picking it up when there was nothing else going on in the handwork department.  When I was nearly half-way finished the quilting, I discovered that there was a large "bubble" in the backing.  The machinist hadn't gotten the fabric smooth before she began to baste.  I didn't have it in me to rip out all of my quilting and start over.  So I proceeded on, knowing all the while that my very beloved quilt would have a major deficiency when finished.

I finished it last night.  I love the quilt.  And someday I'll get a better photograph so you can see the pretty colors (although that may happen if you click on the photo now) and see some of the blocks where make-do fabric was substituted.

But for now, it is finished.  And, despite it's problematic back side, I love it.  Blackberry does too.