A Door Diversion

I've told you all how I only work on one thing at a time.

I guess I must be a bit tired, because before I went to bed the other night, I got to thinking about my brother's barn.  I went into the studio and started throwing fabrics around, looking for the right fabrics to build this barn in fabric. There were a couple of issues. Here's the front view of the barn...

and here's the side view. It's apparent the grey on the front is because that part of the barn has weathered. So which color is the barn? How do I want to interpret it?

I have to start with the doors anyway, because the size of the doors determine the size of the barn.

Here are the fabrics I pulled:

Here are some light browns and grays.

Here are some warm browns and golds.

Here are some dark browns and some greens.

Here is a batik black, some greys and a light, cold blue. That metal bar across the top of the doors is the track for the doors and it is so bright, I think a blue would work as well as a silvery gray.

I will start with the windows in the door. There isn't any glass in those two rows of "windows" in the doors. They are simply openings. I like those "windows," and I want to include them. I'll have to keep them very tiny.

As I usually do, I will strip piece the windows. This is a strip of 1-1/4" black sewn to a 1-1/4" strip of yellow gold fabric. I want the finished width of the window frames to be 1/8", so I've trimmed this yelllow gold down to 3/8".

I've sewn another black strip to the other side, and pressed the yellow open on the back.  Now I'll cut the strip crosswise into 10 pieces.

I'm sewing the black and gold pieces to a long strip of the yellow gold.

Next I trimmed that yellow piece down to 3/8".

Now I'm sewing the window pieces together.

 I have to remove the yellow piece on the far left so I can make that edge of the window frame larger.
(Note: later I made the window bigger by adding another pair of windows. The real barn has two rows of seven windows across, but that would make my barn block way too big, so I made an executive decision.)

 Here's one of the finished windows. Notice the top and bottom strips are not in the original fabric pull. I decided I needed some subtle contrast in those parts of the windows, and went rummaging through my scrap bins.

Since I didn't have a lot of the gold fabric I planned to use as the body of the door, I made a test door with the X reinforcements out of scrap fabric to work out the size and angle of the X. I had to do this twice until I got it right, so working from scraps to solve this issue was a good idea.

Attaching the window piece to the door with the X reinforcement was fussy at best. I needed to make sure I had space for the 1/4" seam allowance on each side.

Here are the two doors with a bit of edging added to each.

Here are the finished doors. I've made a few modifications, but that's to be expected. I'm really happy with them.

Now that my curiosity is satisfied, I can go back to the Dark Majesty quilt, but don't worry, I'll bring you along when I build the rest of this barn.