From One Barn to Another

When you say barn quilt nowadays, people often picture a wooden barn block attached to the exterior of an actual barn. I have one of those and posted about it years ago (click here to read that post).

Earlier this year I made a fabric barn quilt and entered it in a contest in which it traveled for 6 months. After I got it back I realized I had never included it in a blog post. It was a very enjoyable project and I tried a number of different techniques to accomplish my goals, so I felt it was time to share it with all of you – since it’s still the same year as I made it (by 2 weeks  :-D) ! It’s called “From One Barn to Another” and it measures 24″ square.

This was actually created by combining photographs of two different barns owned by my friends Glen and Di Lohr who live just across the road from me. Di was happy to have me do a photoshoot one sunny summer afternoon, as inspiration for a Barn Quilt challenge which invited quilters to do something innovative with the barn theme.

The majority of the quilt is the interior of their German Fachwerk barn.

Unfortunately this window didn’t look out at their more traditional Wisconsin style barn. But that didn’t stop me, I just Photoshopped™ it in,

and used my repliqué technique to do most of the work. 

The bricks created the greatest challenge for me. I certainly didn’t want to satin stitch all the way around each one. Neither did I want to use raw-edged repliqué (stitch around each brick and trim away so the mortar shows through). So I did something completely different – I thread-painted (stitched heavily in mortar colored thread) the mortar in as a wholecloth design on brick colored fabric! 

The challenge fabric we were required to use was a barn board print. I used both sides of the fabric to achieve shading in the window frame (the right side was gray while the reverse was much whiter):

Out the window I did all the man-made objects with repliqué, and the God-made objects with raw-edged repliqué (no satin stitching).

When it came to the ceiling, I didn’t have a dark enough shade of brown, so I painted what I did have:

I was pleased with the finished results. I’m going to hang on to it for a little longer, in hopes of exhibiting it in a few shows, but eventually is will be gifted to my wonderful neighbors.