In the first post on Barn Quilts I told you about how to frame the wood and get the boards ready to paint.  Now we’re moving onto the more colorful side of things – painting!

I knew my color scheme was going to be bright – orange, purple, yellow and red.  When I went to the store I chose colors right at the bottom of each swatch for greatest impact – Jack O’ Lantern, King’s Robe, Bumblebee, and Poppy.

Normally I would start by painting the lightest color first but since I’m going to be crawling all over this quilt I wanted to start in the center and move my way to the edges – so I started with Jack O’ Lantern.

I have to paint four coats of each color.  This was a bit challenging with the crazy level of humidity we’ve had in Wisconsin this year.

But I just took my time and the paint ended up looking great.

One thing I learned about during this process is Frog tape.  It works better than the blue Painter’s Tape at creating smooth, straight lines.  I switched over to it for King’s Robe.

I’m not really sure why I chose to do Poppy before Bumblebee, but I did.

and I think it looks great.

I was down to the last color and the humidity went absolutely crazy.  No matter what I did I couldn’t get the frog tape to stick to the wood – not good.  So, I pulled out my trusty blue painter’s tape and it did the job.  The lines weren’t quite as perfect as the frog tape would have done, but remember – this is going to be observed from a distance – they won’t notice a few imperfections.

Four coats of paint and a few hours of wait time later – I pulled the last tape off to see what I created!  I think it’s going to look fantastic at our apple orchard.

My next, and final post, on making Barn Quilts will show how we mounted it to our barn – the last phase of this project.