One of our editors, Liz Aneloski, forwarded a link to the Quilt Trails website to the CT Staff. I enjoyed it so much I thought I’d share it with you all.

In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, sits picturesque Yancey County, full of old tobacco barns and winding trout streams, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Here you’ll find a completely different summer quilt experience, part of a barn-quilt movement that has swept across much of the country in recent years.

One of the densest and most creative examples is the Quilt Trails of Western North Carolina. In just two of the participating rural counties, Yancey and Mitchell, there are more than 130 bright-colored wooden quilt blocks mounted to the sides of barns and buildings along highways and country roads and in small towns. The blocks range from two to eight square feet and are painted either in timeless patterns like Ohio Star, Log Cabin and Dresden Plate or in original designs reflecting their surroundings (the quilt block for the Burnsville Hosiery Company, for example, features socks in a star pattern).

Back in 2001, a woman named Donna Sue Groves decided to paint a wooden quilt block on an Ohio barn in honor of her mother. Now people in at least 24 states have organized efforts to decorate local barns and buildings with quilt blocks, both to celebrate local traditions and bring in tourists.

—excerpt taken from Stops Along the Summer Quilt Trail, Wall Street Journal (May 23, 2009)

Check out all these quilt blocks that can be found along the trail!