A Tisket, a Tasket

by Steffani McChesney

Everybody loves baskets. Quilters love to make quilts with baskets on them. You can find the basket motif on quilts made in America all the way back to colonial days. Earliest examples were featured on whole cloth quilts as trapunto or “stuffed work.” Basket motifs were often found printed on imported fabric from India favored by quilters for use in broderie perse.

Use of basket imagery reached its apex in the magnificent, complex Baltimore Album quilts of the mid-eighteen hundreds. The baskets on these quilts almost appear to be real, made with bias strips in intricate woven designs.

Crazy quilts of the late 19th Century were often decorated with detailed embroidered baskets filled with elaborate flowers made of silk ribbon. Designs on these quilts often depicted cornucopias filled with fruits and vegetables.

Basket patterns were also popular during the 1920s and 1930s. Quilts were very feminine during these decades featuring floral designs on white or other light-colored backgrounds, the flowers often displayed in baskets.

Basket motifs in quilts are still popular today, appearing as blocks on quilts in more simplified forms made out of triangles, though these triangular basket blocks are not a modern invention. Quilt historian Barbara Brackman has found what she believes to be the earliest example of a pieced basket block dated 1855.

We don’t often use baskets today for their original intended uses such as carrying groceries home from market, but we still love their beautiful but functional shapes, using them as decorative items in our homes or as bearers of gift items. Baskets will always appear as a favorite motif of quilters as long as we take up cloth and needle and thread to make something beautiful to please our eyes and our hearts.