Chocolate Covered Cherries

It's the best feeling to find a pattern that you love and then be able to make it almost completely from stash. (In this case, the pattern is Chocolate Covered Cherries from Jo's Country Junction.)

For the past couple years, I've been pulling together brown scraps and red scraps for a few different quilts. I love to use them....and hate to use them, because what if I take a few strips to make something and then don't have enough left for all the other things?  This project was worth the risk, and it's really just a strip of this and a strip of that...not enough to make much of a difference when it comes to the other projects.

I love this quilt. But when it came time to quilt it, I started to realize that I might have bitten off more than I could chew. It's big, bigger than most things I quilt on my Janome. The longarm wasn't an option, because the backing fabric I was determined to use was an inch and a half wider than the quilt top. I've had that problem before and cut just enough off the edge of the quilt top to make it work. But that dubious technique wasn't going to work with those pieced borders. So, in a couple of spots, I've eased the top to make it fit the backing.

Obviously, this one isn't going to be entered into any quilt shows. It's for me and mine and we're so hard on our quilts that it might not survive the decades. Or it will, and people will know how I really quilted.