My town, Spring City, is a very small town—about 800 residents. It was established in the mid-1800’s and has remained mostly untouched by development. Because of it’s isolation, many original structures still stand and many of them have been restored to original, and better, condition.
It’s picturesque quality and natural beauty with so many springs in the area, that keep it green even during dry summers, have attracted many artists as full and part time residents. In the autumn the Spring City Art Council organizes a Plein Air Art Competition and Show.
Last Wednesday this year’s competition began. Over fifty artists participated. Anywhere— along dusty country roads, paved roads in town, and the highway leading to town—for several days it was common to see artists with their easels set up, gazing and painting at a particular view of interest.
Today was the big event, the contest was judged, prizes awarded, and over 200 paintings were for sale all documenting the last three days in our local town. It was a big event.
In conjunction with the Saturday festivities our local quilt group (about 10 members) was asked to hang a quilt show.
This is our third such show. The Spring City Quilters were born just over two years ago and the quilts exhibited today were made in the last two years by our members.
The log cabin quilts were a group project. We meet weekly at the local elementary school, but once each year we have an all-day event. Two years ago we decided to do a fabric exchange for making a log cabin quilt.
Each member purchased five different one-half yard pieces of brown and beige fabric. We each cut our yardage into 2-1/2 inch strips. On the quilt day we put all of the brown strips into one very large bag and all of the beige strips into another bag. We then exchanged fabric by passing the bags around with each quilter drawing out one strip of fabric each time the bag was passed to them.
We went home (after a great lunch and an afternoon of sewing) with lots of different brown and beige fabrics all cut and ready to sew into a log cabin quilt. As you can see, depending on the accent color that each person added and the setting she chose, the quilt all turned out different.
Many of these quilters were brand new to quilting and they rose to the occasion making lovely quilts. It was a pretty good show for such a small group of quiltmakers.