Quilt Trails Project

End of Season Party
Join us for our End of Season Potluck at the Paint Studio on Monday, October 24 at noon. We will celebrate all the quilt blocks we painted this season and enjoy some great food and fellowship. YOU are invited. Meet the painters, see the painting process and be amazed. Bring a dish of food to share. Carole, our paint captain, has promised a pot of regular chili, vegetarian chili, and cornbread. We will supply plates, cups, drinks and eating utensils. We need to update the pins in our map so come and put a pin where your quilt block is! The Paint Studio is on East Main St. in the Shortbus Studio complex. The driveway is directly across the street from Dr. Aldridge's Eye Institute and goes down the hill beside a white house with white cast iron furniture in the yard. We are in the back building with a big quilt block painted on the door.

Winter Schedule
Even though we are having an End of Season party, that doesn’t mean painting is going to stop. We will be painting through the winter on Mondays from 10-2. We have a lot of new blocks in the hopper so if you want to have some fun and make some new friends, join the paint crew! We won’t paint on days when snow makes travel hazardous, so winter painting is always safe. Jane Greene will be the winter Paint Captain and you can check with her before heading out. You can reach her at 828-688-9047.

New Office
Quilt Trails has a new office! We now have an office in Burnsville at 105 W. Main St. Suite E. If you want to stop by, please call for an appointment – 682-7331. You can call on the spur of the moment – we just want to make sure we can be there when you want us there. You may have tried to call us the week we were moving and gotten a disconnected message. We are really sorry about that but want to assure you our phone is now working and we are celebrating a new space. We are still digging out and unpacking, so bear with us, but we should now be easier to find and more convenient for you.

Calendars
We didn’t get enough photo entries for our calendar this year so we won’t do a calendar. We thank those of you who did send in pictures – they were great shots, we just needed a lot more. It takes at least 24 pictures to do a calendar and we didn’t get that many this year. If you had some but never sent them, go ahead and send them. We can always do a late calendar if I get enough shots.

THANK YOU!
Quilt Trails would like to thank Mountain Lifestyle Communities for their past two and a half years of corporate support of our project. Because of their support, we were able to add another 100 blocks to our trail so that we now have over 200 blocks and have become one of the best quilt trails in the country. Quilt Trails can be found in 30 states plus several provinces in Canada, including Prince Edward Island, which we helped start. The model we established is now being copied in other counties and states.
Also because of their support we have been able to buy almost all our supplies locally and create new opportunities for local artists. Over the past five years we have put over $147,000 directly into the local economy. Of that, local artists and other local craftsmen and tradesmen and women have received over $90,000. Additionally, tourism has increased in Yancey and Mitchell counties, thus bringing badly needed outside dollars to the community.

Quilt Trails works. It helps capture our history (if you haven’t read the Tour Guides yet, you can look forward to some great stories), it helps generate income for local artisans and businesses, thus fostering economic development, and it helps give all of us pride in where we live.

Sadly, Mountain Lifestyle Communities has discontinued its position as sole corporate sponsor of Quilt Trails but will remain an active supporter of the community's non-profit sector. Nevertheless, I am happy to report that Quilt Trails remains very much an active and vital part of our community. We are still painting and installing quilt blocks, and if you want a block, all you need to do is fill out an application form (available in our Gift Shop or on our website www.quilttrailswnc.org.) Our Paint Studio will be open this winter on Mondays from 10-2. If you would like to help paint, just give us a call at 828-682-7331. If you would like to help write the stories or volunteer in some other capacity, please call us. We encourage you to visit our Gift Shop at the Chamber of Commerce in Burnsville.

We have been a volunteer organization since beginning in 2005. Because of the support of Mountain Lifestyle Communities the organization was able to pay me as Executive Director for two and a half of those six years. Now I will go back to being a volunteer, so nothing will change for you.

We are in the process of launching Quilt Trails in Buncombe County and are helping Franklin County near Raleigh get their trail launched. As we grow Quilt Trails we will be looking for new corporate sponsors. If you would like to be a part of this great organization in any capacity, please give us a call. Donations to Quilt Trails are tax deductible as we are a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation.

Again I like to thank our faithful painters without whom we wouldn’t have quilt blocks!
Thanks for reading and being a part of this great project.

Barbara Webster
Executive Director

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This page was last updated on Monday, 17 October 2011 04:20 PM