Easter gift baskets - with tutorial

As promised yesterday, here is the tutorial for the felt Easter gift baskets I made this year for our family. I only finished late last night, so some of the pictures are darker than the others, but the ones for the tutorial part should be clear enough for anyone to follow.

I made three baskets in different sizes. The one in the tutorial turned out to be the largest, but I'm sharing the measures here for your reference anyway. If you want your baskets smaller or larger, just adjust measurements proportionally.

Bottom of the basket: a 32 x 22 centimeters rectangle
Longer sides: two 32 x 17,5 centimeters rectangles
Smaller sides: two 22 x 17,5 centimeters rectangles
Handle: a 5x 48 centimeters strip of felt

To make one basket you'll need felt in two different colors and a few pieces of plastic or cardboard (to help keep the basket shape).

From your plastic or cardboard, cut pieces according to the measurements you have chosen (the bottom and the four sides of the basket; unless your felt is really very soft, you should not need this for the handle).

From the felt, cut one piece for the bottom, two for the longer sides, two for the smaller sides and one for the handle. Do this with both felt colors.

Sew the exterior felt to form a box. Don't worry if it looks a little wonky. It won't have it's final shape until you're almost finished, but I promise it will work out fine:

 Do the same with your liming felt, so now you'll have two (wonky) boxes:

Turn your exterior felt box inside out (to hide the seams) and put the bottom piece of plastic or cardboard in place:

Fit the lining inside (so that the boxes are wrong sides together) and fill the sides with the remaining plastic or cardboard pieces:

 Next, join both pieces of the handle together and top stitch, so it looks like this (front and back):

Pin all around the basket, tucking the handle ends in between the lining and the exterior felt. Slowly, your basket will gain a more uniform shape.

Now the only thing left to do is to top stitch all around the basket. This is actually the trickiest part, especially if you are sewing a big basket. I had to pull half of my sewing machine off the table to have room to turn the basket around as I was sewing.

One additional tip: unpin one of the sides of the handle (marking its place), sew all around the rest of the basket and them put back the handle in place to just top stitch over it. After three baskets, I found this was the easiest method, otherwise you won't be able to turn the basket around completely. If you find this last part just too difficult, you can hand sew around the top anyway.

This is how it looks once finished: 

After sewing all three baskets, I added the Easter tags I posted about yesterday and started filling them with goodies.

Enjoy, and have a wonderful Easter!