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by ALLISON CASEY
Lifestyles Editor
Dotted through the mountains of Western North Carolina, colorful quilt squares hang contrasted on red and gray barns.
The Barn Quilt Project came to Watauga and Avery counties last summer through a $2,000 grant from HandMade in America, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting crafts in Western North Carolina.
Participants are
asked to take a singular quilt square from a large quilt and paint the
square on an 8-foot by 8-foot piece of wood.
Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corporation donated the use of their bucket trucks to hang the quilts.
Ashe,
Yancey and Mitchell counties already had the quilt project and The
Watauga County Arts Council sought to “connect the dots,” Cherry
Johnson, executive director of The Watauga Arts Council said.
“It’s a
cool project,” Johnson said. “Sometimes it’s a pattern from [grandma’s]
quilt that they wanted to replicate and hang on grandma’s barn.”
The quilts hang on various barns and other buildings throughout Western North Carolina and make a trail throughout the state.
John W. Turner serves on the board of the arts council and heads up the Barn Quilt Project committee.
“We were one of the last counties to get them,” he said.
There are currently nine quilts up in Watauga County and three or four in the works, Turner said.
“Some of them are random [patterns],” he said. “Some are older patterns.”
Turner painted a square for his barn using three different watercolors.
“This is my second one, the first was a test pattern,” he said. “When I get bored with it, I’ll put a new one up.”
Johnson
said although the patterns are sometimes meaningful, they are also
sometimes created out of love for the pattern itself.
If painted by an artist, the squares cost $500.
If the owner opts to paint the square himself, the cost is dropped to $250.
“Of
course, anyone can paint one and put it up,” Johnson said. “But if they
want to be on the trail they have to go through us.”
The arts council gallery currently has some miniature versions of the patterns on display.
“I don’t
know that it’s an important part of Appalachian history exactly, but it
encourages art in the county itself,” Turner said.
Eventually, Johnson would like to create a compact disk drivers can play while touring the locations.
“They
could pop it in, listen to directions, information about the quilts and
the owners,” Johnson said. “And when they’re not getting talking,
they’ll be mountain music. That’s my long term goal.”
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