Barns on the Brain

Julie, maker of the incredibly, fabulously awesome quilt, See Rock City, and I have been talking  about barns lately. Mostly she's laughing at me. All the while she was making See Rock City, I was telling her there weren't that many barns around here.

Of course, that was when I lived in the city. Now I live out in the "boonies" (actually I'm less than five miles from the old place),  I see them all over the place. This purple one is less than a mile from my new home.

And then there's this one, on the way to work.

and this one is across the street from Quilted Threads. The last time I went to QT, I took the "back way" instead of the highway, and passed at least a dozen barns.

 I stopped to take a picture of this one. So I'm eating a lot of crow!

Julie wrote a book about making "improvisationally pieced barns," based on things we see in real barns. It's coming out in April of 2016. Julie and I have had a lot of conversations about it, and now I wanna make a barn.

Or two.

Or three.

This is my brother (the fine furniture maker)'s workshop. It looks like a barn. This photo was taken last May.

He built it (naturally), and I think this might be a good place to start. (This photo was taken last week. My brother and his wife live in the high desert in Colorado, where they already have snow on the ground.)

This is the inside of my brother's workshop. We all like to see each other's sewing studios, so I thought you might like a peek inside. Here's what he had to say about it when he sent me these pictures: "The barn is forty feet wide. The shop is heaven!!"

 (sigh)


Yup, I'm between projects and can't think of another "normal" quilt to make, so I'm gonna try my hand at making a barn.