making 4 rounds and 1 sheet cake with red, white, & blue basketweave design. Question - will the basketweave colors look better vertically or horizontally. Seems like vertical would be easiest but.... Cannot decide which. Help!

What do you mean by vertical or horizontal? Are you talking about what color should go where?

If it has to be all three colors in the woven part itself I would do mostly white both woven up n down and across then intersperse a red stripe and a blue stripe going up and down.

My plan A would be to do it all white with red and blue trim.

I would do alternating red and blue verticals and all white horizontals. I have a few three-colored basketweave cakes in my photos that were done this way.

oh i totally agree-basketweave is hard enough to do and have come out nice-kiss (keep it simple silly) do the trim in red and blue for sure

I would do the colored ones with a straight round tube and the white with a regular basket weave. I think I would do the red & blue right next to each other as one 'weave'. So that the multi colored weave is the same width as one white weave.

I would practice on the table to get the look I wanted.

Just my .02:

White verticals with alternating red, white, blue, white, red, white, blue, white, red, etc. horizontals so that you wind up with stripes of red, white, & blue going all around the cake.

Someone else may have said the same thing a different way, but this is how I "see" it.

HTH
Rae