‘Where everyone can enjoy it’

Published 10:35 am Monday, October 14, 2019

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Piece Quilters showcase Barn Quilt at chamber of commerce

By Anne Carmichael

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For The Jessamine Journal

 

Each year, The Jessamine Piece Quilters Club raffles off a quilt the group has made throughout the year and donates the proceeds to charity. This year, they broke with tradition and decided to place the quilt where it could be shared with the community and all its visitors, The Jessamine County Chamber of Commerce.

“We had the idea to take a tour of the Barn Quilt Trail throughout Jessamine County and photograph each barn quilt and then put each pattern onto a square in a real quilt,” said Beth Tibbitts, Jessamine Piece Quilters club member.

The Barn Quilt will be on display at the Jessamine County Chamber of Commerce, located at 116 S. Main St. in Nicholasville until the first of December when it will be moved to the Jessamine County Library.

For those who might not know what a barn quilt is, it is a quilt pattern that’s painted on the front of a barn. There are more than two dozen barn quilts throughout Jessamine County. A tour of these barns was organized years ago by Eddie Clements.

To name just a few of the barn quilts on the trail are: Underground Railroad Sampler near Camp Nelson: Grandma’s Fan on Hoover Pike, visible from US27; Jessamine Flower by the Jessamine County Homemakers on Jessamine Station near Short Shun; and Crazy Quilt on Catnip Hill Pike near the Chaumiere du Prairie, a pre-civil war historic home.

Tibbitts recalls seeing the barn quilts for the first time after moving to Nicholasville. “When I moved to Jessamine County from Lexington approximately five years ago, I began to notice the barn quilts as I drove around the countryside,” Tibbitts said. “I asked a friend at Hayden Construction about them and he referred me to Eddie Clements, organizer of the Barn Quilt Trail.”

In 2007-2008 Eddie Clements and the Art Depository of Nicholasville received a grant from the Jessamine County Fiscal Court, and together with the Jessamine Count Extension Office, the Jessamine County Chamber of Commerce and other volunteers they solicited quilt patterns and barn locations from county residents.

Barn Quilts were painted and installed in 2007 and 2008.

Clements solicited quilts from all over the county to be turned into barn quilt patterns. The patterns were then painted by the Homemakers Club and a committee headed by Jane Ball. Finally, the Electric Co-op’s bucket trucks were used to paint the patterns high on barns where they would be most visible.

“With over 24 quilt designs, putting them on a quilt seemed the perfect way to bring them all into one place where everyone in the community could come and see them and enjoy them,” Tibbitts said. “When we finished the quilt, we decided we just couldn’t give it away in a raffle as we usually do. We wanted everyone to be able to enjoy it, so where better to display it than the chamber of commerce where residents and visitors alike could come and view it.”

For more information about the Jessamine Piece Quilters or the Barn Quilt Trail, contact Jane Ball  at 859-885-5811.