I Love Cherries (or Hi-Ho Cherrio!)

I didn't know if I should call the quilt "I Love Cherries" or if I should name it "Hi-Ho Cherrio" after one of the first board games I played as a little girl...

...at any rate...here it is...a lap quilt which measures about 72x79. I've been collecting cherry themed fabrics for a couple of years. I'm not sure where I first saw the Japanese X and + block. I think I saw a picture on some link from a blog from a blog from a blog...but I eventually searched and found a tutorial at a blog named badskirt. 

72 blocks make up the quilt. 

How can you be in a bad mood when you are surrounded by so much color? 

This is the backing...little kids and cherries. Sweet. I quilted it on my sewing machine with a concentric circle pattern in variegated blue thread on the back and cream colored on the front.  Those aren't knots in the picture...they are little pieces of thread that got caught in the quilting.  I had thread snippets everywhere. In the middle of quilting my thread seemed to break after every couple of circles. I cleaned the machine, I changed bobbins, I re-threaded, changed needles, re-threaded again, cussed quite a bit and then finally changed the brand of quilting thread I was using as top thread and then all went well. 

I have other collections of fabrics of my fav things. This is the first of many quilts to use up some of that fabric. I thought it would be a nice lap quilt to take to the nursing home should I ever see that day. But by then there will probably be "death panels" that will deem me unfit to even see another day. 

Hmmm... Didn't I just say "How can you be in a bad mood when you are surrounded by so much color? "

Linking up at Quilting by the River and Quilt Story