By LISA SIMPSON STRANGE
GLASGOW — Take a drive down Uncle John’s Lane off South Green Street and a recent addition to the neighborhood landscape will quickly reveal itself.
Martha Ann and Larry Jolly have embellished a barn at the back of their property with an artist’s rendering of a quilt block with a theme close to Martha’s heart.
She has been a Glasgow High School Scottie Band booster for almost 20 years and is known affectionately as “Momma Jolly” to generations of current and former band students, so her design had to incorporate that personal history.
“I collect Scotties and apples and of course the border (of the quilt block) is the Scottie Band tartan — Musselburgh,” she said.
Martha said she had been thinking about the idea of adding the painted quilt block to the barn for awhile, then on the Sunday of the past Labor Day weekend she attended an Elliott family reunion at Jo Ann Foster Park in Temple Hill and on the way home saw a John Deere tractor design on a barn alongside the roadway. She decided if someone could have a tractor motif she could just as well have her own special design, she said.
The Jollys hired Mike Hudspeth, who has a local vinyl lettering business, to paint the design for them. The 8-foot by 8-foot project was the first large one he had done, Hudspeth said. Previously, 3-foot by 3-foot was the largest he had undertaken.
Martha gave Hudspeth a sample of the tartan plaid she wanted on the block and described the design of which she had dreamed and he executed the plan from there.
The artist, along with Tony Ervin and Aaron England, attached the completed custom quilt block project on the front of the Jollys’ barn on a cold, sunny day in mid-January.
Following one false start and a short delay because of a small technical problem (remember, always measure twice), the three men were able to secure the artwork to the building while Martha and Larry watched their progress. The couple was well pleased with Hudspeth’s work, they said.
“You take a design as well-established as that one is, you can’t go wrong with it,” Hudspeth said.
