I’ve fancied making a chandelier quilt for a while, so after my offer of a quilt for my great niece for her christening was accepted I downloaded the pattern free from Lella Boutique. I also watched a great tutorial on YouTube by Jenny Doan of Missouri Star. It doesn’t look too difficult. I’ve not done a quilt ‘on point’ before, but every day’s a school day!

Ages ago I bought a layer cake on a facebook destash site, it’s got lots of Hoffman batiks in pastel shades, blue, green, purple, pink, orange. There’s forty different fabrics, some only subtly different but different all the same. I decided to use it for Lexie’s Quilt. It’s pretty whilst keeping options open with colour schemes. I’ve just used an ivory cotton for the background.

I had a big cutting out session one weekend. I needed a 5″ square and two 2.5″ squares from each colour, plus one extra as I need 41 blocks altogether. I then needed lots of 2.5″ wide strips, 84 were 7″ long and 84 were 5″ long. Then there’s the triangles…it took a while!

Once I started sewing I got into a bit of a routine, stitch a few, press a few. I’ve almost finished stitching all the blocks together. I’ve put a few up on my design wall to give you (and me!) an idea of how they look.

The next job will be to decide how to arrange them. I’ve been saving images of these quilts on pinterest for a while so I know there’s lots of options…lines of colour, mixes of colour, graduations of tone…lots to think about and play with. At the moment I’m thinking of mixing all the colours up, but I also wondered about having the darker shades in the middle and the lighter towards the edges…I think I need to play with a few different layouts.

Hopefully once I sort the layout then it’ll go together fairly quickly. I have however re-thought my plan to make a quilt a month, so three quilts by Christmas…maybe it’s a tad ambitious! I was thinking of giving my two granddaughters a quilt each for Christmas, however I’ve decided to do them for birthdays instead. This means I only need to make Lexie’s quilt and one other by Christmas (Pip’s birthday is 1st January!) and I’ll make Harriet’s after Christmas. That leaves me more time for dress-making 🙂