And Now to Choose the Binding...

The first question to ask when binding a quilt (I believe) is to decide whether a quilt needs room to breathe or whether it needs to be contained. With Larkspur, (the Pink Barn) it's hard to tell which it needs. What I do know is a light binding wouldn't work at all. 

 

This is the first option, a kind of a greyish green, is kind of blah.

This patterned pink stripe is another option, (but kind of overly fussy.)
 

This big print won't do either, although that is the print that is on the back of the quilt.

I really like this blue. It isn't the same fabric as the blue trim on the barn, but it's close enough.

Blue it is. Or rather, it will be.

 

Holy crap, it's February?

Julie & Lynne: Inspiration Goes Back & Forth

At the end of 2011 I was making a sample quilt for a houses class I was planning. I was making my houses quilt into a quilt of the Four Seasons. Julie was following my work. "I like your houses," she wrote, "but I want to make some barns." I told her to go for it, that they were the same basic thing.

 I suggested she draw them out first so she'd know where she was going and how she could figure out how to build them.


Well, Julie took the idea and ran with it. She made a spectacular quilt, and you can read all about it here, among many other places. Julie not only shares her story about that fabulous quilt, she shared the occasionally painful process it took her to make the quilt as special as it is.

is is my Mom and the sock kitty Millie at the AQS show in Syracuse NY in 2015.

 The quilt won awards and traveled around the country on exhibit in many AQS shows. It's Julie's story, and you can read it on her blogs, here and here. I was thrilled to have been an inspiration to her.

Julie and many other quilters had made "Low Volume Quilts". I thought they were lovely and subtle, but for me they were boring as hell. I'm pretty sure I moaned about them to Julie with alarming regularity. I didn't want to make a typical low-volume quilt. I wanted to make a quilt that would thumb my nose at the concept. I wanted to make a word quilt, and when I found the right quote, I did it.

While this was happening, I had been asked to speak and teach at Quintessential Quilts in St Louis MO in the fall of 2013. It was a busy year for me.

I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington DC that spring.

I spent a few days in California in September with my son and his then girlfriend. This was the trip where I met SewGirl, and brought the four-letter word.

Julie put a countdown clock on her blog.

I was working on my speech, my class, and the logistics of getting to Missouri with a boxful of quilts. At one point, Julie said she would attend, and drive the five hours from her house to St Louis. Since I didn't want to send my quilts halfway across the country to just anybody, it was agreed I would send them to her. She and her husband Larry would photograph them, and then she'd drive to St Louis and I'd see her at the class.

I chewed on that for a bit, and then I wrote to Julie... "What if I flew to Memphis instead of St Louis? I could stay at a hotel that night, and then you and I could drive to St Louis together? I'd get to meet you in person, and we could get to know each other on the drive up there?" Julie agreed, and said I could stay her spare bedroom.

 So on Thursday October 3, 2013, after I got off a plane at the Memphis airport, I walked outside and toward a car that had this sign on it, waiting...

Look! I'm in Memphis!

It had been over five years, and I finally met my best friend in person.

Johnny Barn

A couple of weeks ago I showed you this picture of the barn that inspired my pink barn.

When I brought the pink barn top to Janet-Lee for quilting, I told her it was inspired by the barn at the bottom of her street. "Oh, that's John and Deb's barn. Let me take a picture and send it to them." I asked Janet-Lee what the barn was for. "I think it's just for storage." It turns out John & Deb built it themselves.

So when I drove by that day and the doors were open, I pulled over and ran up to the barn to take pictures.

The barn is post-and-beam construction (the same as my brother's barn in Colorado) and is, in fact, used for storage. I saw bicycles, tools and several surfboards. I was impressed to see a wasp's nest hanging from the second story railing, and not at all surprised to see a UNH hockey jersey hanging in the barn as well (UNH hockey is BIG in the Seacoast area).

After I took my pictures I saw a man working out in the yard, and I went over to talk. It was John. 

"Janet-Lee showed me the picture of your pink barn quilt and asked if it looked familiar. I said, 'That looks a lot like MY barn.' JL said it WAS my barn."

I told him I thought his barn was beautiful. We talked a bit about barns, and how I have had "barns on the brain" for some time, and now looked for and at barns wherever I go. He said he had looked at a lot of barns before he built his. We talked about several features of his barn were typical of New Hampshire barns but are not found in barns in neighboring states. Later I sent him pictures of my brother's Colorado barn and my interpretation of it.

He invited me to stop by on my next visit to JL and see the timber frame screened in porch he built at the back of his house. He also said he's planning to build a 10' x 14' timber frame structure for his wife, a muralist, next spring.

"It will have basically the same feel and proportions as the big barn, but just a bit smaller," John wrote to me in an email later, "The fun never stops!!! Haha!"

A Pink Barn Starts

I hate leaving for a vacation trip with a project half started, so I deliberately didn't do much sewing before I left for California. Once home, I knew I needed to get into the studio to do something, even if it wasn't a "big" or "important" thing. 

I'd been toying with making a pink barn, so when I finally decided to get up off the couch (at about 4 PM yesterday afternoon), I headed into the studio to make some windows. When making a free-pieced barn or any other kind of building, it's best to start with the smallest details first.

 Hmm, maybe not this pink stripe. It's too orange-y in real life, and I want PINK!

I'm going to use this butterfly as a decorative element in the peak of the pink barn.

Barns on the Brain

I am always on the lookout for neat looking barns as I drive around. Here are a few that I have photographed over the last few weeks.

 This isn't an old barn, but it's a very handsome one. It is in Hampton Falls NH.

This worn out, worn down barn is on Route 114 on the way to Quilted Threads.

As you can see this barn is connected to an old house that has seen better times. As I was driving out to Peterborough with my dad on Saturday we looked at a lot of barns. "You know," my dad said, "keeping an old barn in good shape costs a lot of money."

This Francestown barn is famous. It is featured in a lot of calendars about New Hamsphire. As you can see, this barn is decked out for the Fourth of July. During the holiday season, the owners hang wreaths to every door and window.

"You know, the cupolas on the top of the barns aren't for the looks, they're for ventilation," my dad told me.

We got ice cream at Ava Marie's Chocolates after I bought some Lemon, Lime and Basil infused olive oils at Monadnock Oil & Vinegar. I had "Mississippi Mud" ice cream, which sounded awful to me, so I had to as WHAT it was. Turns out it was coffee flavored ice cream with oreo cookies and chocolate chips. It was seriously awesome. My dad had Maple Walnut. He's 87. Can you tell we're related? Can you tell we have a good time when we're together?

Right behind us in the picture above, we could see this barn across the street.

This is the side of a bar in downtown Peterborough. I don't know why there are names written on the siding, but I thought it looked terrific.

One other thing. Notice the big blocks of granite that make up the foundation of this building and many of the other barns in New Hampshire. Julie was blown away when she saw them.

"Well, this IS the Granite State," my dad said, laughing.

Barns on Saturday

I'll be teaching a free-pieced barns class on Saturday, at Quilted Threads, based on Julie Sefton's book Build-a-Barn. You can see pictures and get the book here. The class is full and we are going to have a good day.

This is the barn I made for the Colorado Quilt, and it is based on this barn that my brother built.

Kendall & Bonnie

Sometimes you take a picture and you know right away that it's a terrific one. This is one such photo. This is Kendall and her grandmother Bonnie, at the barn class I taught at Quilted Threads in the summer of 2017.

Kendall grasped the idea of free piecing immediately, but it was Bonnie who did the sewing. Kendall was learning so she could do her own barn for a particular project. The two worked together very well and it was clear they had a loving and warm relationship.

I was surprised when they both walked into my classroom on Saturday. They wanted to show me the quilt Kendall had made for the project she had told me about. I was totally gobsmacked. The quilt, as you can see, is spectacular!

This is a closeup of Kendall's barn. It is amazing. All my letter making students were very impressed!

Barns!

Here's one of the barns from the class at Quilted Threads on Saturday.

The class was very small, only four students, but it was great. I was able to give each student a lot of personal attention, and helped choose fabrics with a couple. We had a lot of in deep conversations about "What if I..." and "How should I do this..."

We talked a lot about Julie's quilt, and spent a lot of time looking at all the wonderful details. I had a grand time as well.

Colorado on the Rocks

The Colorado Quilt is finished.

I'll get a few more beauty shots, have it appraised, show it off to my students at QT this coming Saturday, my family at Thanksgiving and then it will fly across the US to the high desert where my brother & sister-in-law live. There the quilt will live a life of a bed quilt.

Beginning Binding

Last night I sewed the binding to the Colorado Quilt. You know I sew it to the back of the quilt,

and then fold it over to the front, where I will sew it down with a blindstitch. You can read about how I do it here and here. And if you want to know WHY I sew my binding down on the front of my quilts by hand, (even though that's the way I was taught to do it - make the binding lie flat, make it even and make your stitches invisible) you can read this story that makes me smile to this day, some thirty plus years later.

I find the whole discussion so amusing. All my students freak out when I tell them. Even the vaunted Gerald Roy popped up out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box when I told him I did my binding on the front of my quilts, and that I did it by hand! Later, I asked my pal Julie why he did that?  "Because he missed it," she said. "He's an expert. He's supposed to be able to NOTICE things like that."

Heh!

So anyway, I've got a week's worth of tv watching to do while I sew the binding down on this quilt. I've been planning another scrap slab triangle quilt for when this quilt is finished. I will teach another Barns class at Quilted Threads on January 27th, and another Birds class on February 10. If you want to attend, you better sign up now. Apparently my classes fill up fast, which both surprises and pleases me. 

Colorado Quilt, Quilted

That's me (on the right) with Janet Lee Santeusanio of Woodland Manor Quilting, who quilted the Colorado Quilt. It is all hand guided free motion, and she did an outstanding job. Janet Lee brought it to me at Quilted Threads so my students could see it. This photo also shows just how big the quilt is.

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Here is a closeup of the quilting on the barn block. It's really spectacular. I particularly love the pebble quilting on the ground in front of the barn.

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Here some of my students check out the signature panel on the back of the quilt.

Here's a detail shot of the quilting. You ought to be able to click on this photo to see a larger detail of the quilting.

I've chosen this warm grunge green as the binding for the Colorado Quilt.




If you would like to make your own free pieced birds, you can get my bird tutorial here. Each bird represents something I saw in Colorado when I visited in June. (Scroll back through my blog to see each one in detail and what inspired it.)  I also have a tutorial to make the free pieced butterflies. I modified the flowers from the Old MacDonald Mystery Sampler Block Lotto and interpreted my brother's post and beam barn in Colorado into fabric using Julie Sefton's Build a Barn book as inspiration. As usual, the quilt is completely original and designed by me, Lynne Tyler, without the use of patterns, templates or paper piecing. There will  NOT be pattern for this quilt available, EVER. I am much more interested that you make your OWN quilts.

It's not that scary! Happy Halloween!

Barn Builders

These were the lovely ladies in the barn building class at Quilted Threads on Saturday. They worked hard and had a great time. (That's Julie Sefton's quilt, See Rock City, behind them. One student remarked. "You know, I have the book, and looking at the pictures in the book, I thought the quilt was okay, but in real life, oh my god, that quilt is AMAZING!"  Yeah, that's why I think everybody in the area should make an effort to come by and see it.)

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I love teaching. I hear the best things. One student said, at the end of the class. "I don't like my barn. It's not what I want." She looked at me and grinned. "Of course, this morning I didn't know what I wanted, and I didn't know how to do any of this, couldn't work without a pattern and didn't think I'd be able to finish. Now I know what I want and I know how to do it."

"So I guess that means it was a good day," I asked?

"Yeah, It was frustrating, but I learned a lot. It was a good class."

Bear in mind, all these students came in with photos of REAL barns they wanted to interpret in fabric, a task MUCH harder than simply building a generic barn.

After I demonstrated how to sew a 1/8" line one student looked at me and said, "Now that's a takeaway that was worth the cost of the whole class. And that's the SECOND one I've got so far." I felt pretty good hearing that, because it wasn't even noon.

It was also nice to have one student tell me, "You are a REALLY good teacher, and that's rare."

Yup. It was a good day for me too.