Wisconsin barn quilts on display

By Tabatha Hunter

Posted: July 29, 2009 at 6:32 a.m.

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BENTONVILLE — For the last several years, Barbara McPhee of Rogers and four of her friends have traveled to her family's home in southern Wisconsin for a week of milder weather and friendship.

In 2002, the women were driving through the Wisconsin countryside when they became intrigued by the old barns along the way. It was then one of the women suggested making a quilt of the barns they saw.

"All of us thought it was just a wonderful idea. Of course, none of us had any clue about what we were getting ourselves into, and we jumped off into the deep end of a very deep pond," McPhee said.

Over the course of the next five years, the friends traveled once a year to Wisconsin, where they bought fabric and worked on their barn quilts, and gathered the history of each of the barns they were quilting along the way.

The end product was five quilts that depict the barns of southern Wisconsin during different times of the year, each with different elements waiting to be found in the quilt patterns, said Leah Whitehead, executive director of the Peel House Foundation in Bentonville.

All five of the quilts will be on display at the Peel Mansion in Bentonville until Aug. 21. The cost of the exhibit is $2 per person.

"We are all absolutely delighted with the quilts. We love the fact that they are all the same barns, essentially, but they are all different," McPhee said.

"(The quilts) are truly fun things and something the public can really enjoy," Whitehead said, noting that anyone who visits the Peel Mansion should look for the hidden elements of each quilt.

News, Pages 4 on 07/29/2009

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