Not the material/fabric kind.
I'm talking huge, barn decoration kind. They are seen throughout my area of East Tennessee and I think it's a trend that can be seen everywhere. I think these are so wonderful and I have been wanting a reason to make one.
That's where this crazy dog house project comes in as mentioned in previous post. Did I sign up for it just so I could do a quilt square? Subconciously, I think, yes. Why not start small instead of the massive ones on human size barns...
We signed up for the AIA East Tennessee annual Barkitecture event this year and nailed down... the barn concept. Of course it will need a quilt square.
I was ecstatic!
As the barn was being built (the dog house barn), we ran through tons of quilt square ideas. If a dog lives here, what kind of quilt square needs to be on its barn? Would it be a squirrel? Maybe it should be a bone, fire hydrant, paw, and the list goes on. Definitely needs to be a paw.
Quilt squares are geometric. They are an art. This should be simple.
My new found respect goes out to quilt square painters and sewers!
I sketched all over the place. But as you see with my artwork of greeting cards and frameable prints, they are sketches, whimsical, and loose. These squares seem controlled, precise, and wonderfully simple, very straight, lines.
Luckily I have Adobe Illustrator. This will handle all of that for me. (This is going to be so eassssy...) It even has a function where I can do one square and it easily repeats the image into a grid. Plus I can drawn my own kind of grid.
Let me repeat my new found respect for this art. I struggled. Meanwhile, the dog house was pretty well finished. How did I misjudge construction being easier than a tiny quilt square?
Because of its size, it was also a test in tight painting skills. If anyone can give tips on avoiding painters tape paint 'splurges', let me know. It was a battle that I won in the end but it was not without a few swear words and layers of paint.
As you can see, the final product is NOT a bone, hydrant, squirrel or paw as once hoped. It WAS a paw. But it was looking more like a dogwood flower. Therefore, I decided not to fight it and stick with this concept to KISS (keep it simple stupid). Our area glorifies this beautiful tree so in the end (IE our annual Dogwood Arts festival - not to be missed!), it was perfect.
Have you created a quilt square? Share in the comments.
Do you want to make one? Let me help you from what I learned (and struggled). I'm attaching a PDF grid with diagonal lines (quilters love triangles!) to this blog post so you can use this as a sketching start. If you want the dogwood square outline that we did on the house, feel free to sign up for our newsletter and we'll throw that in for you!
This post is 100% human generated – even the images. All grammar errors are my own.