Basket Quilt for Millie

Millie, my 11 year-old daughter, loves all things old-fashioned.  She wears old-fashioned dresses very frequently.  You can read about the Laura Ingalls Wilder dress I made her for her birthday HERE.  One of the many benefits of homeschooling is that she is not influenced by the opinions of peers, in clothes or any other realm of life.  She is her own person and wears her own style, and she is very lovely!

Millie has been wanting to make her bedroom more old-fashioned for awhile now.  I have given her some limits, {no wall painting and the bunkbed and desk remain}, but she can pretty much make all of the other choices.  I'm not too worried; she has good taste!

Here is her current room.

A vintage butterfly quilt found in Millie's great-grandmother's things.  

Nobody wanted it.  

We love and treasure it!

She wants to keep it {and so do I}!

A cat quilt I made for her way back before I knew much about quilting.

It'll find a new home in her hope chest.

Maybe I'll see it on a grand-baby's bed some day!

Millie said, "I LOVE IT!" when she saw the floral fabric on the left at the local quilt shop in my little hometown.  A town of less than 4,000 people has an amazing quilt shop with more fabric than any of the quilt shops in big 'ol Bellingham.  This is Nana's Garden by Red Rooster Fabrics.  We found coordinates in pink, yellow, and green, almost all are from the Nana's Garden line.

The next step was to find a pattern for the fabric we had collected.  After checking out a large pile of vintage quilt books from the library and poring over them, she chose Barbie's Baskets from Cutting Corners, a book I have had on my shelf for a long time!  The background fabric will be the medium rose print on the left above in pink rather than the yellow shown in the pattern.  The only rule I gave her in choosing a quilt was that it could have only a tiny bit of applique, preferably none.  I don't mind making these baskets because they are pieced, not appliqued, with the small flowers tacked on.  The quilt pattern will have to be enlarged quite a bit to fit a twin-sized bed.

I'll be making new bunk bed curtains out of the main rose fabric, as well. Hopefully the lace curtains from her other great-grandmother's things will fit the window!  Sew fun to sew sweet things for my sweet girl!