Photo by Gary Lloyd.
A bright red barn, nicknamed “The Tinker’s Chest” on Teresa and Bryan Blanton’s property was added to the Alabama Barn Quilt Trail in February.
A barn in the Trussville area is now listed on the Alabama Barn Quilt Trail.
The red barn at Teresa and Bryan Blanton’s house on Glendale Farms Road, in unincorporated Jefferson County, was officially added to the trail in February.
The Alabama Barn Quilt Trail is an agricultural tourism project meant to encourage the public to explore the roads, farms, businesses and historic towns of Alabama. It is supported by the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Alabama Farmers Federation and others.
The quilt pattern added to the Blantons’ barn was one from a quilt that Bryan Blanton’s mother made for his graduation in 1976, the bicentennial of the United States. Predictably, it is red, white and blue.
“It’s a big thing,” Teresa Blanton said of the trail. “I think there are over 200 barns in the state of Alabama [on the trail].”
Teresa Blanton said it’s been a two-year process to get on the Alabama Barn Quilt Trail. She submitted several quilt pattern options to the organization, which then suggested the pattern from her husband’s quilt that his mom made him.
“I told them, ‘Oh, by all means,’” she said. “That would be real important to my husband, especially.”
The barn was constructed in 1996 by Bryan Blanton. Teresa Blanton uses it for her business, The Tinker’s Chest, where she works as a florist and makes stained glass. Teresa Blanton’s father, in his spare time, “did woodcraft and everything else.” He tinkered. The name was born from that, she said.
“I thought, ‘How befitting, The Tinker’s Chest,’” Teresa Blanton said. “It’s been a little bit of salvation. When you start doing stained glass, you’re going to find that all your worries disappear, because you cannot concentrate on anything but what you’re doing. Cutting the glass, drawing it off, getting each piece to fit right. But the Barn Quilt Trail is something that is real prominent throughout the state. More people need to know about it.”
Word traveled fast after they were added to the trail. Two women saw a post Teresa Blanton made on Facebook and visited the barn on the day the quilt pattern was being placed by her husband and one of her sons.
The Blantons plan to add more quilt patterns to their barn, which is visible from Gadsden Highway in Trussville headed toward Argo. All are patterns quilted by family members. The one that the Alabama Barn Quilt Trail will show on its website, however, is the one from 1976.
“It means a lot to know that people will be seeing a picture of what his mother made,” Teresa Blanton said. “It’ll tell a little story about us, and it’ll show the picture [of us with the quilt] so that it shows that the quilt is an original pattern that was done by his mother. So that means a lot.”
For more information about the Alabama Barn Quilt Trail, visit alabamabarnquilttrail.org.
