Candy Hearts Baskets is the latest installment in my basket series. I had originally planned it to be in red, pink and white fabrics only for Valentine’s Day, but looking through my whites I came across the charming little print you see in all three blocks (click on the photo for a closer view). Before you know it, a citrus-colored Valentine’s quilt! This one is calorie-free.

Next is my Valentine’s cookie quilt (definitely not calorie-free). Made of chocolate and vanilla sugar cookies, it features embellished heart blocks. It’s easy to make one of your own: just mix up different shades of pink dough from the vanilla, you don’t even have to completely blend it in for a “hand-dyed” look.

Cut the rolled out dough into squares and use a small heart-shaped cookie cutter to cut a heart out of the center of each one. Fill the holes with a contrasting heart “appliqué” (actually, it’s probably more like piecing, but I like to think of them as appliqués.) cut from a different colored square and decorate some of them with sparkly sugar and colored sprinkles, and bake.

After they’ve cooled, arrange them on a tray. If you stack them up several cookies high, then when people take them from the top layer, you still have an intact “quilt”. I stacked them up randomly for an ever-changing quilt.

If you are really ambitious, you could use the cookie cutter as an appliqué pattern and make one out of fabric to go with the cookies.

happy quilting!