This past year I was contacted by the The Indiana Barn Foundation about helping to design a quilt for them tied into the Indiana Bicentennial. The Indiana Barn Foundation helps provide grants to barn owners to help them preserve their old barns. Their motto is: Preserving Indiana's Heritage, One Barn At A Time. This is a wonderful foundation. Our old barns are lovely and I'm grateful there is a foundation like this to help them restore and keep them for future generations. For more information you can go to /www.indianabarns.org/
They wanted to create a quilt with a block from every county in the state - that would be 92 blocks! Each block would showcase a barn from a specific county. This was a lovely idea - but a huge project! I was happy to design the quilt and create a block for my county - Elkhart County. I made a block representing The Round Barn Theater in Nappanee Indiana. This was the first block submitted and I never saw any of the other blocks until the quilt was finished.
On Feb 27 all the people that made blocks as well as some of the owners of barns depicted in blocks were invited to a special unveiling of the quilt at the restored Morris-Butler House in Indianapolis.
Here is a photo of the unveiled quilt- it has a bit of sunshine behind it! The quilt turned out lovely. The blocks were very creative and each block had a story behind it. The Indiana Barn Foundation created posters and a lovely book that has photos of each block and stories behind many of the blocks. They also included a short bio or information from the creator of each block. So much work was put into this lovely quilt!
The quilt will tour Indiana this year at various venues. You can request it be displayed near you by contacting the foundation at the website above.
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