Award-winning Quilt Celebrates the Beauty of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail

 Quilters are honored at Public Reception. The Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail will honor the makers of an award-winning quilt depicting landmarks along the trail. Art Bee, a special quilting group that originates from the Durham Orange Quilters, will be honored on Thursday, January 17th, in a reception in the Nature Art Gallery on the mezzanine level of the museum store at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, 11 West Jones Street in Raleigh. The reception is open to the public, and runs from 5:30 to 7 PM.

14 members of Art Bee chose different mileposts along the Mountains-to-Sea Trail as inspiration for their quilted panels. The quilters were only limited by size, and each panel had to match the trail section represented on the preceding and following panels. Trail segments represented artistically include: Clingman’s Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains, Oconaluftee River in Cherokee, Waterrock Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Mount Mitchell State Park, Linville Gorge in the Pisgah National Forest, Flat Top Manor on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, Pilot Mountain State Park, West Point on the Eno River, Falls Lake, Glencoe Mill Village on the Haw River, Tryon Palace in New Bern, Neusiok Trail in the Croatan National Forest, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, and Jockey’s Ridge State Park at Nags Head.

The fourteen panel quilt won “Best of Show” at the Durham Orange Quilt Show in Durham, NC at the American Tobacco Campus in October of 2012 and will be entered in the Atlantic Quilt Festival in Hampton, Virginia in March. The quilt will remain on display in the Museum of Natural Sciences for the month of January.

The Mountains-to-Sea Trail is a linear state park stretching nearly 1,000 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Outer Banks. Each year thousands hike sections of the park, and more and more people are now completing the entire trail. The park is being built and maintained by volunteers. In 2010 the MST was named one of North Carolina’s Top Ten Natural Wonders.