Today I am unveiling the second barn in our barn project. This block “painted” on the side of the barn is a Postage Stamp block. Before the Internet, farmers living in rural areas relied heavily on the postal system and their trusty mail carrier. So a postage stamp block is a tribute to those rural mail deliveries.
Our blocks are different in that mine uses 36 different small squares, and ShaRee didn’t go as crazy mixing it up, but used good design principles by having some repetition in her squares. This time we decided to build the same barn, and when we cut the fabric we were so excited about how cute the stripes were going to look. But during the sewing we got less and less enamored with it. First off, it was hard to keep them straight, and then we decided the overtly architectural look we had been going for with the stripe didn’t really work. Live and learn. We have thus decided to discard another stripe we were planning to use in the future and go with overall prints. We think they will set off the block better and not distract the eye from the block.
We also worked harder on our darn 1/4″ seams and both of us ended with the same size block this time! Too bad they’re still 1/4″ smaller all around than they’re supposed to be. Gah! We have decided that the white sashing around each block is going to make up the difference. We cut the sashing a little wider and at the end we will trim all the blocks to be the same size and hope the white sashing creates an optical illusion of sameness in width. 🙂
So here we go with the photos:
Team ShaRee
Team Sue
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