Larkspur - The Pink Barn

 

I finally picked up the Pink Barn from Janet-Lee Santeusanio, my fabulous long-arm quilter. For this I told Janet-Lee I wanted it special, and to go all out. I am a firm believer that when you are working with an artist who knows what the hell she is doing, that you let her use her skills. JL and I have a standard set of instructions: She has my permission to quilt anything I give her differently than what she and I originally chose if she thinks there is a better solution. 

JL quilted the stripes in the barn.

She outlined the trim in the windows, and she carried the vertical quilting lines in the body of the barn itself. She also quilted the diagonal lines of the barn doors. This is the way real barn doors are often made here in NH.

Such glorious details!

What I just love about it is how barn-y it is. It is quilted like a barn, not a house or a decorative building. Now JL lives down the street from the inspiration barn (shown below) so she knows what it looks like. I am like, beyond thrilled with it, and now have to figure out what to use as a binding for my barn wall hanging, which I have decided to call "Larkspur."

This is the inspiration barn.

OOOH PINK!

Here's a closeup of the pink barn.You can see the detail in the sky fabric, and the trim I used around the roofline. Every part of this barn is pieced. The black windows and the grey muntins* are also pieced.

In the example above, I like that the pink stripes do not line up above the LARKSPUR panel and that they go crosswise on either side of it. If you don't know why I chose the sky fabric I did, notice how the turquoise in the sky picks up the blue details in the roof trim and the inset square, and the green in the sky fabric also picks up the green background of the butterfly block. And notice the blue roof trim is NOT the same fabric that surrounds the butterfly block. You do NOT have to be slavishly matchy-matchy.

 The blue acute angle near the roofline, shown here in the blue, is something I see in virtually every NH barn, but it took me a long time to figure out how I could include it in a barn block. Very often this angled shape is the same color as the body of the barn.

All the little colorful details in the top part of this barn read as feminine so I really wanted to use a fabric for the barn doors that would keep that feeling. I wanted it to include the colors I'd been using, and be a stripe, so I could use it at an angle, since so many barn doors around here have doors constructed this way. I've had this fabric in my stash for some time, and it is beyond perfect.

This is part of the bottom panel that includes the ramp up to the barn doors. The supports on either side of the ramp are usually stone, so I chose a fabric that looked like that.

Here is the finished barn. It is about 38" square, and uses 16 different fabrics. I'm pretty happy with it. If you need an idea about the scale, the black windows are 1" tall by 3/4" wide. I've kept this photo pretty big, so you can click it, then double click it again to see all the little details.









*muntin: the strip separating panes of glass in a sash

More Pink Barn!

I'm back working on the pink barn. I created the row of lights above the door.

Then I made the doors and the sides and put them together. Many barns in New England have doors constructed with angled strips of wood, so I wanted to find a decorative fabric that would give me that feeling. The fabric I picked for these doors is a jeweled stripe, and I cut the doors on the bias. The jewels pick up the colors of the barn as well as the blue I've used as highlights. 

Here I have trimmed the sides and added the blue trim on the corners of the barn. My inspiration barn lives in the woods, so I put some green fabric to one side to see what it looks like.

Here's my inspiration barn. As you can see, I've taken a lot of liberties.

PS: Happy Birthday to my barn-building quilting buddy, Julie Sefton.

I Went Shopping... and Another Thing.

I needed more pinks for the pink barn, so this morning I got up early and drove to my favorite quilt shop, Quilted Threads.

I really like the pink in the middle with the little bursts of color. I'll use one or more of these for the body of the barn. I haven't decided yet.

These three were in the sale room, and I may use one or more as accents.

 I know the batik I looked at the other day would be nice, but I really liked the happy feel of this fabric, which I will probably use for the sky. Remember, we don't want to be TOO LITERAL!

So now my fabrics are taking a spin in the washing machine. I'll get to work on the barn later, but first, a confession.

Last week, I needed something from the top shelf in one of the kitchen cabinets. I'm five feet tall, so I have to use a stool. Instead of getting the step stool, I grabbed a small footstool from the living room. I got what I needed, but my foot caught the edge of the stool, overbalancing it, and I fell. The upper half of my body landed on the counter, and my left wrist hit first. I couldn't grab anything to steady myself, and I fell over backwards onto the floor.

Aside from feeling stupid, I wasn't hurt. My left wrist was sore, but I could move all my fingers and hand in any direction. I took some ibuprofen and put some ice on it and then continued about my day. My wrist was swollen, but that was to be expected.

Most of the swelling went down after a day, but some remained, a funny kind of bump. My wrist only hurt when I bent it far backwards.

After several days, the swelling was still there, and I knew I'd have to get medical advice. I have osteoporosis as well as arthritis. Sigh.

So yesterday I went to the local Urgent Care facility and got it looked at and X-rayed. Blessedly, there is nothing broken. "But you have a lot of arthritis in your hand," the nurse practitioner told me, "and that interferes with the swelling going down, so it may take some time." She checked my grip and mobility and told me to go home and treat the symptoms. If the swelling doesn't go down in 2 to 3 weeks, I'm to give them a call. The radiologist will review the X-rays on Monday and will call me if something is discovered.

Yes, I know. I am lucky.

A Little Trim...

I've added a thin strip of the decorative stripe I showed you a few days ago to the edge of the barn roof. I like it a lot. It just goes to show that you have to really LOOK at your fabrics to see the possibilities. I wrote a tutorial about that, and you can get it here. It's everything you've ever heard me say about fabric all in one place.

I also like the blue batik as the sky. It's sky-ish and looks windy and cloudy, which happens here in New England.

And I still prefer this geometric print of all the fabrics I currently have for the body of the barn. It also reminds me of the siding in many barns. I know several of you liked the white stripe better, but this is going to be a PINK barn. (But there's nothing that says I can't use it for the barn doors....)

Thinking Pink

This is a garage I pass on my way to the grocery store. I like the reddish trim. This reminds me that less can be very much more.

So I decided to add a contrasting trim to the top half of my pink barn, but that leaves me a conundrum. Now that I've added so much blue, the options for the bottom half of the barn have (of course) changed.

Before I added anything blue, I had chosen this fabric which has woven elements, but now I am not sure.

So I decided to audition some other fabrics. This one is too much the same value as the pink stripe for my taste.

This stripe seems a bit busy. There's already a lot going on in this barn.

I wanted to try it with a blue door. It's too many stripes, but I wanted to see if a blue door would work.

I like this grunge pink, but I don't have enough of it. I have to decide if I want to wait while I order more.

I really like this geometric print. Pretty sure I'll use a white door, but I will definitely use a few bits of blue to tie the bottom part of the barn to the top part.

And one last thing, the blue along the top of the barn will be significantly narrower than it is right now, so it won't be QUITE as dominant as it appears right now.

Adapt & Improvise...

When I am making a barn out of my head, like this one, I don't draw it out first and I don't plan it. I just "wing it." I had not planned to add this LARKSPUR element to the upper part of the barn, but when I arranged the windows underneath the butterfly panel, there was a lot of space between them.

So I looked through my stash for something that would fit that space in an interesting way. I've had this fabric for several years and the colored words were just the right size...

As I laid out the pieces, I thought it might be more fun to make the stripes go sideways instead of vertically. (Besides, I had a couple of fabric scraps I could use...)

So here is the (untrimmed) roof section.

I might add a thin strip of this stripe above as an accent. I haven't decided yet.

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.

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.

 

Barns!

I'm getting ready to teach the Barns class tomorrow at Quilted Threads, so I am gathering up all my stuff. The class is full, but QT always creates a waiting list so I will teach the class again later, probably after the Holidays.

I'm very excited because I'll have the Colorado quilt with me, and it will be quilted! I can't wait to see it. The quilter, Janet Lee Santeusanio of Woodland Manor Quilting, will be delivering it to me later today or at QT tomorrow, I don't know which yet.

Janet Lee wrote "... those birds and chickens are so flipping cute..."

You can see every bird I've ever made if you just look through the history of this blog. If you want to make your own birds, you can buy my tutorial, for sale on Etsy.

The barns were inspired by my friend Julie Sefton, who literally wrote the book on building free pieced barns, Build-A-Barn.  Julie's spectacular quilt, See Rock City, is on display at Quilted Threads. It's well worth a trip to QT to see this quilt in person.

And you may have noticed a new button on my sidebar. I'll be teaching a Birds class at the MQX show in Manchester NH next April. Registration starts November 15th.

Barns in AQS!

It's amazing to think it has been almost three years since I was asked to become a member of the SSOBB, (Secret Society of Barn Builders.) One of my quilts inspired Julie to start making free pieced barns, but I never made a barn until Julie asked me to, in late 2014.

I knew right away which barn I would make, the one across the street from Quilted Threads, in Henniker NH. Little did I know how famous the SSOBB would become, and how sought after the barn quilts would be.

You can see photos of all the barns the SSOBB made in the September issue of American Quilter magazine. Mine are at the top of page 83.