Home Craft Days opens in Big Stone Gap
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BY DEBRA McCOWN
Media General News Service
Published: October 17, 2008
BIG STONE GAP, Va. – Despite the chill and rain, vendors were setting up Friday for Home Craft Days, an annual festival expected to draw as many as 20,000 people to the campus of the Mountain Empire Community College.
“If I can ever figure out which piece goes where, I’ll do all right,” Wrightly Rhoton, of Gate City, said as he assembled a tent Friday for his 19th year at the Home Craft Days festival.
Lucille Rhoton, who brought quilts and crocheted items to sell, said her husband forgets every year how to set up the tent.
Now in its 37th year, the craft festival keeps growing, said Charlotte Green, one of the coordinators who works for the college.
“They wanted to keep alive old, traditional things and involve the community in it,” Green said of the festival’s origins. “People know that they get the real thing here. They’re getting the real items that were a way of life, survival.”
She said the crafts being sold this weekend include quilts and other needlework, candles, jewelry, wood and metal pieces, herbs and spices, corn meal and, of course, apple butter.
Local musicians will entertain the crowd throughout the weekend; the festival runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today and Sunday.
“When I sit down, I’ve got to do something,” Lucille Rhoton said of her quilts, which use patterns from books as well as those handed down by her mother.
“All of mine are done with a chain saw,” said Buren Bloomer, of Dryden, Va., who already had a large tent of wooden bowls set up Friday. “I retired and just had to have something to do to get out of the house.”
While no one in his family seems ready to learn the bowl-making trade, Bloomer said he does have a grandson who helps with gourds and walking sticks – and he hopes he’ll carry on some of the tradition.
“It started when he was 4,” Bloomer said. “He’d sit here on a bale of straw and say, ‘Hey mister, you want to buy a gourd?’ And they’d buy one.”
Admission to the festival is free. More information is available online at http://www.homecraftdays.org or by calling (276) 523-7464 or (276) 523-7489.
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