I love quilting books.  The pictures, the tips, the everything!  When I get a new quilting books, I see beautiful patterns for quilts, and want to make them all, then I see the amount of cutting that is required and put the book away.

This year is all about challenging myself, so I decided that I need to put my fears away and make a quilt that will require me to do some cutting.  Lucky for me that I have the book “Simplify: Quilts for the Modern Home” by Camille Roskelley.  Camille’s patterns are beginner friendly and use mostly pre-cut fabrics like jelly rolls and charm packs.  I found a pattern that I liked then set out to find the perfect fabric.

I have a thing  about cherries (this seems like a tangent, but go with me).  Cherries remind me of when I was 10 and my dad took my brother and me to Europe over the summer.  When we were in Italy the streets were filled with vendors selling paper cones full of fresh, delicious cherries.  I ate so many cherries that summer that I’m surprised I didn’t stain my teeth red!  Cherries make me smile and I even have a sewing basket that looks like a cherry cupcake:

Imagine my delight when I found a Moda charm pack called “Oh Cherry Oh” full of adorable cherry themed fabric.  Since the fabric has been archived by Moda, I had to do some searching for the sets that I needed to come up on eBay.  I finally got everything I need, and sat down this afternoon to start the squares.

I had to cut the honey buns (sets of 42″ by 1.5″ strips) down into smaller strips and group the strips into sets, which was time consuming, but the cutting was simple and so was the sewing. I knocked out 6 squares in about 90 minutes.  Here is one of them:

I have to make 40 of these squares, and may make more so that I can put together a queen sized quilt.  So welcome to my new project- The Cherry Quilt.