Patriotic Heart

I wanted to try one more basket pattern before I went back to making my favorite ones to sell.  This one is heart shaped.  I found the pattern in It's A Wrap II, by Susan Breier. 

 

The hardest part of this basket is keeping the heart shape and then sewing in the tight corners.  I won't bore you with the techniques to make it more triangular, as they are in the book, but it took a lot more time than my favorite baskets and this would make selling it a bit more problematic as the price would have to be higher. I may take the different baskets with me when I go to a craft fair, but I don't have any idea of how to price them.

 

I still have a few bags of fabric all ready to use on my baskets, so what did I do?  You guessed it.  I went to a quilt shop!

 

I like Jo Ann's and Michaels for things I need for my hobby/retirement fund.  (Just kidding.  I am not making big money.)  But I really love some of the fabulous fabric you can get in quilt stores but  The Old Trinity Schoolhouse quilt shop closed and I hadn't been to another in Roanoke.  We were bored and so we went on an excursion.

 

I got some beautiful fabrics.  Some of these will be the only fabric in the basket and some will be used together to make a basket.  Then I needed to get some thread.  They had thread at the quilt shop, but I had a coupon for 50% off at JoAnn's, so that's where we went.  I like the larger sizes of thread I can get at JoAnn's.  It is awful to run out of thread in the middle of a project and have to go out to the store.  It is an hour and a half round trip in the car for a $5.00 purchase.  So I hope I have enough.

One of these days I will buy one of those boards with slanted pegs for holding thread and mount it on the wall in front of my sewing machine.  Oh, wait.  Cats.  Hmmm.  I may rethink that.

 

Look at the fabric and then look at the thread.  The thread cost almost as much as the fabric, before I used the coupon.  Does this make sense?  Fabric is made from thread.  A LOT of thread.  How can this be?

I am getting excited to see how these baskets turn out!