Adam Prudhomme
Editor
A popular rural art form known as the barn quilt has made its way from Prince Edward County to Greater Napanee thanks to a donation from Pat Dubyk.
The local artist gifted Greater Napanee’s North Fred Lifestyle Centre with a barn quilt on Thursday. For those unfamiliar with a barn quilt-it’s not a blanket-but rather a large painted wooden square that was traditionally affixed to the side of a barn.
Dubyk’s donated design is a colourful display decorated with symmetrical patterns in different shades of blue, green, orange and white. Each colour has its own meaning: blue is peace and calm, orange harvest and abundance, green growth and fertility while white is purity and love.
“We don’t go into great detail,” Dubyk says of the designs on the barn quilt. “It’s supposed to be seen from the road.”
Dubyk helped to introduce the art to Prince Edward County, which now boasts over 300 barn quilts found outside homes, wineries and even the local PEC Memorial Hospital. The barn quilts have become a tourist attraction of sorts, with maps available depicting the various routes to travel and where to spot them. She’s hoping to do the same on this side of the Glenora Ferry by creating the Greater Napanee Area Barn Quilt trails. Anyone interested in creating their own barn quilt can purchase one by contacting gnabarnquilttrails@gmail.com. They can then work with Dubyk to come up with their own design that can be displayed on their lawn, attached to a mailbox or, as was their original purpose, hung on a barn.
“It’s a great initiative, it supports local arts and culture, it beautifies the community and has a tourism attraction that can potentially draw people in to discover the trail,” said Town of Greater Napanee’s manager of community economic development Lyndsay Tee, who was on hand to unveil the North Fred barn quilt. “Especially with COVID times, if the trail started now its something that we could do safely.”
According to Dubyk, barn quilts can be traced back to Pennsylvania in the early 1800s and were seen as a sign of good fortune.
For more on the PEC trails, visit www.BarnQuiltTrails.ca.