Lakehouse Baskets

i blogged about this quilt in the last post about My First Quilt--this is one of the last ones i've done. but i'm so happy with it that i'm gonna write a little more.

like i said, this pattern is from the Leisure Arts book series--this one is called Quick Quilts From Your Scrap Bag. (though none of the patterns are particularly "quick.") sadly, i wrote that in my first quilt, i was slavish about following the color placement of the pattern, and on closer examination, i was kinda slavish about this one too.

i didn't follow the colors for the actual baskets--too many of those! but for the borders and setting triangles. oh well, some "real" designer figured it all out and she was pretty good at it! all the basket fabrics are from my stash. way back when, whenever i bought a bright fabric, i would cut off a 8 inch strip and store them in a shoebox. so gathering all the scraps for the baskets were a cinch.

the binding, border, inner sashing & setting triangles are all fabrics from Lakehouse. and that's my sophie :-)

digression time. so i have 3 kids, a 5-year-old (almost 6) and 3-year-old (almost 4) twins (sophie is one of the twins). i still had time to sew when i had 1 kid, but i was pretty besotted with him so didn't sew too much :-) my husband & i were married almost 10 years before having kids, so we had tons of time and energy for our first kid. and then the twins came. of course i loved them too, but wow--it was HARD having 3 kids, and twins at that. i had a little help but not too much and that first year was a blur. needless to say, not much sewing was done during that time.

by the time they were two, i was getting a little more into the groove of things and was able to attend our local Quilt Festival again. (we're lucky in the South Bay Area to have the Pacific International Quilt Festival as our "local" one). i first discovered Lakehouse fabrics there and just loved the bright colors--one stall had all these cute FQ bundles. i'm not one to buy things at full price so when i came home, i looked online and found them at some store (can't remember now) and ended up spending a lot more than i would've if i had gotten those FQs! that's when i got these fabrics. i also bought a bunch of the flowery fabric with a white background and a few other Lakehouse fabs--that'll be another quilt "one day". (and i have another story about that fabric when i post about the t-shirt quilts i recently made.)

oops--a misshapen basket--not worth it to unpick the seams since there's bias edges so i put it on the back.

here's the back. that panel in the middle & surrounding big blocks were a FQ bundle that my friend was destashing. really pretty fabric but i knew i wasn't going to use them for a quilt and realized the back is a good place to put it!

even though the kids are still young, i'm back to quilting. sometimes they can "help" me, but they're at the age where they can play quite happily among themselves (though while writing this post, i've been interrupted numerous times!)

it's amazing how the quilting world has changed in the 3 years that i took a hiatus from quilting. the blog world really exploded and i find so much inspiration from there. designer fabrics seem to be much more prevalent though maybe that's just me. since i don't have time to wander around my LQS anymore, i mostly buy online, and it's safer to buy established collections.

maybe that's why i love this quilt so much--it has a great framework of Lakehouse fabrics, but is also from my stash. a lot of my recent quilts are made from one line of designer fabric--and though they certainly look very tasteful and i love them too--this basket quilt is truly representative of me :-)