Our Barn Quilts

 After thinking about doing a barn quilt for the last several months, we decided to just do it!

 I bought a 4 foot by 8 foot piece of signboard from a local sign shop and I had them cut it in half for me.  Signboard is expensive so we decided to do 4 foot by 4 foot quilt blocks.  We used signboard because it is  lightweight and we didn't have to hire anyone to hang our barn quilts.  Below are the simple steps that I used to create our barn quilts.

 Signboard is very shiny and it needed to be sanded to rough it up a little so the paint would stick.  There is no need to primer signboard or to paint the back of the sign.

I bought Sherwin Williams exterior glossy paint.  I used four coats of white paint.  The quilt block was then measured and drawn out.  I did a black boarder around both of my blocks because I thought that they would show up better on white and grey backgrounds.

 This paint dries within an hour, but I was careful to let a full hour pass before adding another coat of paint.  I also would wait over night to add the next color because I felt uncomfortable putting painter's tape over paint that was only a few hours old.  When removing the painter's tape, please take your time and do the job very slowly.  I always removed the tape before quitting for the day.  I did four coats of each color.

We did a lot of thinking before putting our barn quilt up so no one would accidentally get injured by falling off a ladder.

 So here's a friendly quilt welcome to all our neighbors in Ohio!

The block on our garage is called "Corn and Beans" and the block on the barn is called "Country Farm".  I modified the colors in the "Country Farm" block to three colors instead of four because of paint expense.  These blocks were used from EQ7.

Hope everyone is having a Happy Labor Day!

Happy Quilting!

Kay Lynne