Curiosity leads to Quilts on Campus
Jessica Cross, O&B Co-Editor
Issue date: 1/25/08 Section: Features
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After retired guidance counselor Brenda Sloans's first discovery, she was hooked.
"It is addicting. After you see one, you look everywhere to try to find those quilt squares," said Sloan.
The quilt project began in Ohio when Donna Groves painted a quilt square on a barn in honor of her mother. Since then similar projects have started in Iowa, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Tennessee's Appalachian Quilt Trail has become a tourist attraction. Many quilt squares are replicas of family patterns that have been passed through the generations. The states hope to create a "Clothesline of Quilts."
According to Sloan, her husband, Carson-Newman's Interim President Joe Bill Sloan, jokingly refuses to go anywhere with her anymore because 'they cannot go anywhere without looking at barns.'
Taking out on a journey across the Appalachian Quilt Trail to find all the quilt squares in the six-county region of Knox, Blount, Sevier, Cocke, Hamblen, and Jefferson Counties, Sloan realized that our own Jefferson county, was the only one in the region without quilt squares.
This curiosity led Sloan and her partner, Annette Loy, to contact Eston Williams, the coordinator of the quilt square project. Williams managed to work with the Smoky Mountain Resource Conservation and Development Council, a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture dedicated to encouraging and providing grants for such projects, to obtain a grant to do six quilt squares for Jefferson county. The catch? The grant money had to be used by February 1, leaving only about two months to create and place the six quilt squares. Thus, Jefferson County's Quilts of the Smokies project was born.
"We saw an opportunity and got permission to run with it. And we did!" said Sloan.
Determining the location for the six squares was the next task. Sloan called places and people from each of the six towns in the county to find places of interest. Carson-Newman College's Appalachian Center, Surrett Hardware Store in downtown White Pine, a barn near Rush Strong in Strawberry Plains, a barn near the Sevier County line in Swansylvania, a barn on Chucky Pike in Talbot, and a courthouse or barn in Dandridge became the intended recipients of the six squares. Each site was then allowed to choose their patterns.
Sloan and Loy received permission from Bill and Glenda Kinder to use the Jefferson City Flea Market building to draw and paint the quilt patterns on the wood. Sloan and Loy then found volunteers to assist with the quilt squares.
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