The National Quilt Museum is in the historic district of downtown Paducah. It is a modern building with beautiful stained glass windows which are designed in familiar quilt patterns. The sign on the entryway says “Honoring Today’s Quilter.” About 150 quilts at a time are showcased in the exhibit. Many of the quilts on display are from contest winners who agree to donate the quilt if they take contest money. This provides the museum with an new, high quality additions to the collection each year which means that the collection continues to reflect current quilting trends. There were some really spectacular quilts – both machine quilted and hand quilted. Wow! In addition to the basic collection there were two special exhibits. The first was a set of quilts produced by 10 leading quilt artists. Each quilter produced two quilts which were supposed to complement each other. I was disappointed in these quilts as they seemed to be mostly interesting fabric that was hand painted or computer created/printed and then quilted. Very little piecing in these quilts. They were more quilted paintings than quilts. They did show some different aspects of quilting, however. But not my cup of tea.
The second special exhibit was more interesting to both Rick and I. The theme was a quilt pattern called “orange peel.” Each quilt used the traditional pattern in a new format. Lots of creativity. In addition to the new quilts there was a large selection of antique quilts – mostly from the 19th century – which used orange fabric. I found it so interesting to see how the quilt makers of the past used the bright orange color in their quilts. In some cases it was clear that the quilt maker had run out of some of the fabric and substituted similar colors in the final squares – even modern quilters run into this problem.
After leaving the museum we walked to the levee along the Ohio/Illinois rivers. The miles of levees could have really impacted the view, but the town painted murals of scenes from the history of the town on the levee walls. It was really attractive. We were able to go past the levee onto the riverwalk. One of the town’s residents told us that the water had gone down only a week earlier so that the gates in the levee wall could be opened. We enjoyed the view of all the tugboats and barges on the confluence of the Ohio and Illinois rivers. The commercial traffic had been shut down for several days.
The town was founded in 1827 by William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The downtown area was full of 19th century architecture and nice tree lined streets with pretty parks and alley ways full of flowers. We stopped for lunch in a cozy little downtown café and watched the world walk by. Then we went back to the RV for some maintenance work and cleaning up as we get down to our last couple stops on this trip. Paducah was an out of the way stop for us, but well worth it.
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