About the Artist: Ellen Lynch
I’ve been creative all my life. As a child, I carved flowers into pine boards and painted them. I rode my bike to the lumber yard and tied the boards to the bike for the trip home. I commissioned the work to a local gift shop. Nobody could believe they were made by a 12-year-old girl!
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I graduated from UVM with a bachelor’s degree in education, with certificates in Home Economics and Art. I was the rural school art teacher for six years in Rutland and Addison Counties. I worked in a quilt shop, making custom quilts and teaching quilting and stenciling classes.
In my spare time I was working on my old Ford Mustang. It needed some upholstery work, so I decided to tackle the job myself. When I went to car shows, people always asked who did the custom upholstery. Eventually I left teaching to upholster classic cars, which I did professionally for 40 years.
During COVID I decided to make a barn quilt to fill an empty space on the wall at our camp in Chittenden. I had so much fun making it that I made one for my home, and one for my sister’s home. People would stop to ask where I got the barn quilt. I made a few more and displayed them outside my shop. My sister thought that I should go to craft shows with my quilts, so we did, and a new business was born!
The Process
The quilts are made from ½ inch MDO (Medium Density Overlay) which is a resin coated plywood product commonly used for signage. They are framed with half round trim, which is caulked and nailed in place. The board is lightly sanded and two coats of Kilz 3 primer are applied on both the front and back.
Three coats of a background color are applied, and then the design is drawn in pencil. The colors are painted one at a time, with three coats minimum of each color applied to achieve color saturation. When dry, three coats of water-based spar urethane are applied to all surfaces.
The final touch is attaching footman loops to the back for hanging. The quilt can be hung either horizontally or vertically and looks great indoors or out.
