Gee's Bend artist making quilts of a different kind
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
TOM GORDON
News staff writer

CAMDEN - When he was a boy in Gee's Bend, Tyree McCloud spent many a night cutting pieces for the patchwork quilts his grandmother was making.

As he cut around the pieces of cotton twill, polyester and corduroy, using cardboard size guides that his grandmother had given him, McCloud was bored stiff. Even though he slept under one, and even though women throughout the isolated Wilcox County community were making them, he just could not get excited about quilts.

McCloud is excited now. In the back warehouse of the Black Belt Treasures store in downtown Camden, the 55-year-old stained glass artist and former teacher is fashioning what will be 8-by-8 foot polyurethane-coated plywood murals of some of Gee's Bend's most famous quilts, those that appeared on postage stamps last year. The plan is to place the quilt murals near the home of the woman who made the original quilt and create a tourist-friendly, 17-mile Gee's Bend Quilt Mural Trail.

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Birmingham News
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