One Hour Basket

If you’ve are on Instagram you will have seen about a million of these One Hour Baskets! They looked fun and practical and I was keen for a quick project after having my nose to the grind stone all week making a quilt for a friend’s 40th birthday.

I had a bunch of scraps and I do love a scrappy project, so I made two quilt-as-you-go panels for the exterior.  My technique to keep these panels structured to hold the basket’s shape is to cut a piece of regular cotton quilt batting (not polyester or high loft) and cut a piece of home decorator or canvas fabric for the back of the panel. I always cut these pieces with an extra inch all around to allow for shrinking after the quilting, and trimming the panels up. The quilting stitches add further structure so the basket can hold it’s shape.

I love the quilt-as-you-go technique, it’s perfect for scrap busting.  If you haven’t tried it before, here is a simple tutorial by sotak handmade. If you want to go a bit further with the technique I highly recommend the Quilt As You Go Patchwork Bags class by Tara Rebman.  I bought this class about two years ago and being able to watch the videos and see her trouble shoot was a huge help to me. Craftsy are actually having a big sale on a lot of their classes right now so it’s a good time to check them out.

The tutorial for this is also over on Craftsy – Kelly from Kelbysews offers it as a free download PDF which is very handy. You can get it here.

I was really pleased with how my basket came out. In the past I’ve had a few issues sewing through layers in the final construction phases of projects but my new machine cruised through the layers of quilting, batting and home dec fabric like a hot knife through butter! Sweeeeet!

I had also noticed on instagram that several makers had experienced trouble with sagging handles, so I added a scrap strip of quilt batting into mine and added a couple of extra lines of quilting in addition to the top stitching to make them nice and perky.

My lining is a zig zag fabric that I got from Spotlight a couple of years ago. The multicoloured zig zags work well with all the rainbow patchwork on the exterior.

So there you have it – a basket made of scraps to keep my scraps in! Ha.

And super exciting…drum roll please…this is my first post on my new fancy pants blog! Hope you love the new design as much as I do. Super huge thanks to Sarah from Spunmonkey who did the WP transfer for me. She is awesome to work with and everything was so easy and stress free. Also big thanks to Mandy from Quiet Forest Design who designed my new logo and did a beautiful job!

Now all the behind the scenes stuff is sorted…back to SEWING!

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