Basket Weave

Rainbow of Fabrics

Last week I mentioned that I had been sorting through my stash fabric and found a set of fat quarters in bold bright colours. Yesterday I went to Tricia's Discount Fabrics new store (11-13 Price St, Edwardstown, South Australia) and bought an extra fabric in each colour so that I have three of each of the bold fabrics. Chain stores like Spotlight have really terrible colour ranges at the moment so I had no choice but to go to Tricia's, and I am glad I did as it is at least 4 times the size and still wall to wall fabric. She will soon have a whole room for fat quarters as well as a class room and a chatting room as well! What a store!

Now that I have enough fabric I have started working on another project which I will be doing inbetween the Quilt Along. I am using a strip piecing method to create 6.5" basket weave blocks.

Yellow Basket Weave Blocks

You can see I've started on yellow. First I cut each of my fat quarters into 2" strips and pieced them together with black on either side. After ironing the seams open I cut and trimmed them into 6.5" blocks. After trimming I had a thinner black strip than the coloured strips which I think will work very well into setting off the basket weave design while allowing the colours to dominate.

At first I cut my strips 7" wide because I had 21" to work with. Once I attempted to place out my first three blocks I quickly saw that the key to this design is that you must have square blocks. The design contains the same block over and over either straight or turned 90 degrees so you must have a square.

You can see how the basket weave will come together in the photo, however I plan to work the other colours into the design as well. It is such a simple design and easy block, but I know it will look great as you can see from my inspiration.