My friend Janice and I have just returned from the “Tour de Barn Quilts” put together by the village of Manchester, Michigan. Manchester is small enough and remote enough from Ann Arbor that few Ann Arborites swing by on a regular basis. We need a reason to go there. Ta-da: barn quilt tour. Barn quilts are big wooden squares added to the sides of buildings, each square brightly painted in the pattern of a quilt block. Someone in the Manchester area put one on her barn, and it looked so pretty that other folks followed suit with squares of their own. They really do look spiffy.
Also, it didn’t rain today: perfect weather for an adventure. We’ve had so much rain this spring that we’re no longer holding out for bright sunny days to go out and do something. It’s enough just to have a break in the rain. So we set off, Janice and I, with a copy of the self-guided barn quilt tour downloaded from the web and with Siri to guide us.
The Manchester portion of the county is rural and lovely. Our expectations were high. The tour included a lot of stops. We couldn’t find the first one. Siri couldn’t, either. Oh, well, no biggie. We went to the second stop. We found it and everything. It just didn’t have a quilt square. Hmm.
On to the third stop. Yay! Nifty quilt square on a nineteenth-century barn. Best quilt square we’d seen all day. The next one was great, too. The barn in question was a pole barn, but you work with what you have. We loved this square. The next one also appeared as advertised, a simple red-and-white pattern with a clever touch. The person who painted the block made the red parts the same color as the barn. The result was organic, as if the quilt square had been erected with the barn in the mid-1800s.
Ooh, the next square would be on a quilting studio, our printed-out guide said. This one was going to be awesome. And it no doubt would have been, had we been able to see it. Two sides of the studio were visible from the road. The quilt block must have been on one of the other sides. There was a nice quilt-y pattern worked into the roof shingles of the farmhouse, though.
This is as good a time as any to mention turning around, and the number of times we engaged in that maneuver during our tour. The number must be somewhere near nine. Didn’t see a quilt square? Or an address? Must have missed it. We’ll go back and take another look. And these were not wide residential streets with speed limits of twenty-five miles per hour. These were rural roads, some paved and some not. Shoulders were thin, often sloping down to ditches, and they were, of course, wet from all the rain we’ve had. Barn quilt touring is not for the faint of heart or the new at driving.
The quilt squares we saw after this point blur together, except for what the guide described as the optional loop. The optional loop delivered six squares in close proximity. The first place had one square. The next address had one also and then a second one, further down the property. And the third place had three squares in a cluster, high on a big red barn. The optional loop was the most target-dense part of the trip.
Next, per the guide, came lingering in the village of Manchester for shopping and a bite to eat. We felt ourselves well toured at this point, though, and headed home instead.
All in all, we congratulate Manchester on its Tour de Barn Quilts. Those who put up quilt squares really did a nice job of it, from selecting patterns and colors to painting the squares and mounting them—especially the ones high up on tall barns. Well done, all. To the folks who compiled the tour guide: what a clever idea. Now. About those missing squares. Yes, I did, after I got home and read every word of the guide, even the ones in the tiny print, figure out that quilt-block entries and non-quilt-block entries are all mixed in together in the guide. Given that the tour is a “Tour de Barn Quilts,” however, neither Janice nor I thought to parse the guide for entries that did not deal with quilt squares.
Janice and I hope people in our neighborhood decide to put quilt squares on their houses. Finding them would be a lot easier, and turning around would be a cinch.
6 May 2022