If you spend enough time driving about rural parts of the Eastern United States, you’ll notice these colorful patterned squares adoring barns, houses, sheds, gardens, and more. Called “barn quilts,” they’re painted wooden or metal signs meant to look like a fabric quilt block. The history of barn quilts is not fully clear, but it seems they were brought over to the States from European settlers. There also seems to be some tales of them having a role in Civil War and Underground Railroad times, where quilts were used as a method of signaling information about the house. And to this day, they’re still used, helping create a visual landmark for an area, passing on a family symbol, as part of tourism in barn quilt trail, and sometimes just as pleasant decoration.
When I saw that the towns around Virginia Tech were open to submissions for public art with local themes, barn quilts immediately came to mind as a perfect fit. I mean, they’re a quintessential symbol of this region! I reached out about it, but it turns out I had just missed the deadline for the application in Blacksburg. Over the next so many months, I watched as signal cabinet boxes and murals were painted with the designs of the local farmer’s market, railroads, and pop art-style mountains.
So, I reached out to Christiansburg, the neighboring town, and found out they were also planning to open submissions. I put together a document with some design concepts, and earlier this year, I heard back that my barn quilt proposal had been selected for a signal cabinet box!
I had originally imagined myself physically painting the box, but the town actually wanted to have the art printed on a vinyl wrap. This actually makes a lot of sense to me, since they can they replace a panel if it gets damaged or change out designs over time without losing the art. The tricky thing, though, was that they wanted the design to be vector, which I didn’t have much experience with prior. If you don’t know anything about vector images, essentially rather than storing information about pixels, the file stores the mathematical formulas to generate the images. This means you can make the image as large as you want without it ever getting fuzzy and pixelated looking. So, I bought a subscription to Adobe Illustrator and watched a lot of tutorials. This is where I am truly lucky, as my design lends itself very nicely to working in vector. Since barn quilts are all geometric shapes, it wasn’t too bad putting it all together.
As of August 2026, my design has gone live and is there for the town to see! But, if you’re not nearby to go check it out, fear not, I’ve included photos in this post.
I have to say, while I am not a master at digital art, I’m still really pleased with how it turned out. The front side, which faces the street, is of a barn in the style of a quilt (with a barn quilt on it, of course). There are the mountains in the back with details of sewn stitches, and quilt square designs are integrated into everything from the sun to the grass. The more narrow sides contain regular barn quilt designs, many of which I’ve seen in Virginia on drives. The back, which faces a restaurant parking lot, is of a dogwood tree and cardinal, state symbols, and notably a turkey, which is Virginia Tech’s mascot. I tried to make sure that someone driving by would get the big picture, while someone next to the box could notice smaller details.
Although I’m a little bit limited with how many projects I can take on as a grad student, I’m really excited to slowly keep building my portfolio. I mentioned before in this post that I was trying to integrate art with my science, and since then, I’ve actually had one of my watercolors published in a mini review for Trends in Microbiology (DOI: 10.1016/j.tim.2025.03.003). Hopefully I can keep adding art into my manuscripts while I have the chance. That being said, this has all been possible only with the amazing support from my partner, my PI, and my family in encouraging me to create (and to apply for things that scare me)!
Happy reading,
-Beppa