How to Paint a Barn Quilt for Your Home
Barn quilts make such a fun decor for outdoors–why not make one to fill a large wall inside? Here’s a full tutorial on how to paint a barn quilt on bead board or plywood for unique indoor or outdoor decor.
Yield: 1 quilt
Calories:
Cost: $17
Equipment
- Pencil
- Ruler
- Paintbrush
- Painters Tape
- Hanging Apparatus (to hang the artwork on the wall)
Materials
- 1 piece Plywood or beadboard cut to 4‘ by 4‘ Or any size you want, square recommended.
- Several colors of paint Leftover house paint works, acrylic craft paint also works fine – you will be surprised at how little paint it takes really.
Instructions
- Find a quilt pattern that you’d enjoy painting for your home. For a first-time project, I would suggest a simple pattern without curves involved. My wall art was inspired by the quilt on the barn above (which I found on this Pinterest board of barn quilts).
- Paint the entire board the predominant color that it will be. If there is no predominant color, then just choose one and paint the entire board with it.The reason I did this step is two-fold: First, it’s easy to paint the entire board. The rest of the painting will be inside lines. Secondly, it puts a primer coat on the board making the rest of the colors go on easier. I painted my entire board light green and the edges navy (for a little accent).
- Next draw the quilt pattern onto your board. For the pattern I chose, I divided the 4′ x 4′ beadboard into 16 squares (4 across and 4 down) using my ruler and light pencil lines. Just imagine the beadboard being a grid and lightly pencil in the lines for the quilt pattern. If you chose a fairly simple quilt pattern, drawing it on your board is an easy step.
- Mark each of the marked areas with the color that it will be painted. You can write the color inside the lines or just dab a touch of that color paint inside the lines. This will help prevent you from painting a section the wrong color. I used little pieces of painters tape marked with a “B” for blue, “G” for green and so on.
- Time to start painting. Choose a color and mask off those sections with the painters tape. Then paint all of those sections.Don’t worry if your paint bleeds from one section to another a little bit. Especially with beadboard where there are grooves in the wood, it’s likely to bleed a bit.You can paint near the lines with a dry brush to prevent the paint from seeping. But don’t worry about it being perfect. You can touch it up after you remove the tape and the paint is dry. My wall art is far from perfect – but that’s fine.
- Edge and hang the quilt (optional). After I finished painting all the sections and touched up my little goofs here and there, my husband built “sides” for the beadboard to make the wall hanging stand out from the wall about an inch. This is optional though it adds a nice finished edge.
Notes
- Note: if wanting to use outdoors, purchase an outdoor sealant as well
