A Quilt for Shindig

One of the things I really like to do in the summer is attend the weekly Saturday evening outdoor event called "Shindig on the Green." It's a mountain music and dance program that features a "house" bluegrass band, a couple of scheduled traditional dance/clogging groups, and the rest of the program is "open mike" and made up of entertainers who just show up and sign up to do a couple of songs each. The music is a mix of bluegrass and traditional ballads that stem from the Scots-Irish heritage of the Appalachian region. It's a wonderful community event in a beautiful setting, last year returning to the refurbished Pack Square Park in downtown Asheville. Shindig happens in July and August and starts each Saturday evening "right around sundown."

This spring my friend Alice and I decided to make a quilt and donate it to the Folk Heritage Committee. The FHC organizes "Shindig" and our quilt will be raffled off to raise funds to support their work.

It was a fun collaboration! We chose to make a traditional pattern, a log cabin quilt, and set it in the "field and furrows" design, because we felt that was in keeping with the agrarian roots of mountain music. Log cabin blocks traditionally have a red center, to signify the hearth, so we chose contemporary batiks in golds and blue-greens to surround our fire. The quilt measures 60 x 84 inches and consists of 35 blocks. None of the blocks are identical!