A few weeks ago I posted about going to a Barn Quilt class and posted my mostly unsuccessful block….
I enjoyed learning about the technique and was determined to not be beaten by it. I sanded the board well, covered it with several coats of Kilz, and painted it with a base coat…..
As I looked at the colors of paint that I had available, I decided to go with an Autumn themed block to start with. I mixed some brown and white paints to get an interesting color and started the process. As in the class, I marked the center points of each of the “patches” in the block but didn’t actually draw the lines in. Instead, I used painters tape to mark off each section before painting.
After removing the first line of tape, I came to the understanding that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing…..
Then I remembered that, when I had helped to decorate the church for Vacation Bible School, we stuck the masking tape to something else first so that some of the stickiness was gone and it wouldn’t take the paint off of the walls. I started out by sticking it to my clothing but was still having trouble with it pulling the paint off. Then I started sticking it to skin so that the oils would definitely take out some of the stickiness……
I also realized that I didn’t need to stick the entire piece of tape down, but just needed the painting edge to stick well. I re-taped the inside and covered up some of my mistakes……
….but now I need to fix the outside squares and triangles. That caused a problem since I had mixed the original paint and was never going to get the color the same. So, even if all of the pieces didn’t need to be repainted, I mixed up some more paint…..
…..and easily repainted the outside patches……
Now it was time to tackle the inside pinwheel, but I had gained a few insights that made the process easier.
Firstly, I used pieces of tape that I had already painted on but just used the opposite side. It definitely saved some time!! I then used the tape edges to mark out the area that I needed to paint…..
After a light coat of paint, I moved to the hair dryer and gave it a quick going over…..
Then back for another light coat of paint and immediately, CAREFULLY, pulling the tape off…..
After another stint at the hair dryer, I was ready to move to the next area to be painted. I continued in this manner and, before I knew it, the block was fully painted.
One of the things that I learned as I went along was to use two thin layers of paint rather than one thick layer. Since I was having good success, I decided to go back and fix a few areas that hadn’t painted well when I had started, like these brown streaks…..
Once I had figured out which color of paint I had used……
….it was a simple task to make the quick corrections.
I am thrilled with the final result…..
I had worried that it would take much longer to do the block with tape rather than free hand but, in fact, I worked for less than 2 hours on the design.
I am planning to hang it on my front porch so will need to seal it well before I can call it completely finished.
This was so much fun and so simple to do and I am thinking that all of my friends and family might expect to see one coming their way at Christmastime…..oops I shouldn’t have said that!!!
One thought on “Barn Quilt Revisited…. successfully this time”
This has turned out so well. It will be a great addition to your porch.
Great tips on using the masking tape. I had not thought of the idea of sticking it to something else first to make it less sticky. That makes a lot of sense.