Canada has barn quilts. And barns.

Lots of you know that I recently spent two months in Canada*.  An amazing time was had, and I hope to write a few more blog posts about what I got up to when I was there, but for now I want to start with barn quilts. And barns.

I'd heard of barn quilts, but I'd thought they were just an American thing. But Canada has barns too, so why not barn quilts as well?! 

A barn quilt is a big quilt block painted on a piece of wood and stuck on the side of a barn. They've been around for hundreds of years, farmers used all sorts of folk art to decorate barns in the past, but in the last few decades they've had a resurgence.

They are often used to draw tourists to small towns, with barn quilt trails leading visitors from one place to the next. These barn quilts I photographed are all around the tiny town of Ailsa Craig, in south west Ontario, where I spent a week at the Ailsa Craig Quilt and Fibre Arts Festival.

One of our lovely hosts, Mary, spent an evening driving Clare, Catherine and myself around miles and miles of lovely countryside. There were more barn quilts I got to see but didn't photograph because the light was getting pretty low.

The south west Ontario countryside was beautiful. Quite flat, lots of farming, gorgeous trees that were just leafing out for Spring, and lots and lots of great barns.  I loved the shapes of them and the colours, so different from New Zealand.

The iconic Canadian maple leaf had to feature somewhere! If you want to know more about the barn quilts in Canada, you can visit the Canadian barn quilt website, where you can read stories about the people behind them and find maps if you want to follow a barn quilt trail.

As well as new barns, there were also lots of older buildings. Such great shapes.

Mary knew who owned this one, so we were able to get up close and personal with it.  There are also lots of barns that don't have barn quilts, but are still decorated in some way.

And then I got to rural Nova Scotia, and I found SO MANY brilliant barns! Unfortunately we were driving a hulking great camper van by then and Hubby couldn't really pull over for me every time I saw something I wanted to photograph (sad face emoji), so lots of these next pics are taken from a moving vehicle.

Gloomy.

Nova Scotia has quite red soils, nicely echoed in the rust on this barn.

That's the Bay of Fundy in the background of the barn above. It has the highest tides in the world and when the tide is out there is acres of red tidal mud.

How could you not love everything about this big red beauty?

This one (above and below) is a rebuilt approximation of the barn on the Anne of Green Gables historical site on Prince Edward Island. This property was were L M Montgomery spent a lot of time as a child and was the inspiration for the house called Green Gables.

And I found other great buildings too, like this wharf shed in Maine, US.

And last, but not least, how about this abandoned house on the hill in New Foundland?  I hope you enjoyed my little structures of North America tour.

*That goes some ways to explaining the big black hole in my recent blogging activity!