Houston’s Big Blanket Super Picnic started as a memorial—and became a movement.
On social media, it’s hard to miss: drone shots of DJs spinning under giant live oaks, bright red-and-white blankets spread across Menil Park, and the occasional clip of some young adult washing the same picnic blanket at a Heights laundromat.
Armed with 30 picnic blankets from Amazon, Caleb Matheson and his friends launched what would become one of Houston’s biggest events. The Big Blanket Super Picnic, Matheson’s brainchild, has enticed curious minds with an all-day, supersized outdoor friendship-fueled gathering featuring DJs, food vendors, and arts-and-crafts stations. But for Matheson, the Big Blanket is more than just an event. What began as a memorial to a close friend has become a remedy for loneliness—a space for Houstonians to connect and foster community.
Everything began with his friend Imhotep Blot, Matheson says. The pair were classmates at the University of Houston, studying architecture and industrial design. Matheson stayed in Houston after graduation, while Blot moved to New York, occasionally visiting to see loved ones. “He would come back into town and host these picnics,” Matheson recalls. “He would just come and say, ‘Hey, I’m at the Menil. Pull up.’”
Fans of the Big Blanket gather at the city’s parks for an afternoon filled with fun times.
For the two architecture students, the picnics were more than a pastime—they were a lesson in design. Much of the curriculum in architecture courses was about defining physical boundaries, and picnics are considered the “cheapest, lowest effort way to define space,” Matheson explains. Put down a blanket in a field, and boom—you’ve created and outlined your niche in relation to the park. Sharing food and communing with friends and strangers was just a wholesome and spontaneous way to use that footprint.
Over time, the picnics became a way for a dozen strangers to meet and form new friendships. As a recent graduate navigating the loneliness of adulthood, Matheson found the picnics to be an effective way to expand his social circle. Still, one day, Matheson was struck by a simple idea to make it even more impactful: “If the blanket was just bigger, that experience could happen with [a] larger number of people.”
With Blot’s support, Matheson bought 28 picnic blankets, and with his gang of college friends, the ragtag team sewed Velcro strips to the edges of each blanket to connect them. Thus, the Big Blanket was born, its inaugural large-scale picnic planned for spring 2023.
Blot planned to fly in from New York for the event, but days before his trip, Matheson got some earth-shattering news: Blot had suddenly collapsed and died on March 17, 2023. “This is like a weird joke,” Matheson recalls thinking. He struggled in the days that followed Blot’s death, questioning whether to continue the project. Ultimately, he decided to move forward in his friend’s honor. “Imhotep has always been just a creative collaborator, partner of mine,” he says. “I know that he would have wanted to go through the thing, because through school, we were always doing little events and just trying to make places where it was easy for people to mingle and meet each other.”
Along with his friends and collaborators, Matheson hosted the first Big Blanket picnic in April 2023 to honor Blot. Held at Menil Park, the super picnic hosted around 150 attendees across the Velcro-connected blankets. For the second picnic, held at White Oak Greenway in October 2023, Matheson added two more blankets to the fold. As the fabric grew, so did his core team and friend group, with Daniel Clapp, Miranda Gonzales, Maddie Sinclair, Rami Namani, Olivia Haroutounian, Aiden Massingale, Veeda Shaygan, and Rohan Agnihotri all helping out.
Matheson’s friends and collaborators worked together to sew the big blanket.
The group tapped their networks across Houston to scale up the picnic. They enlisted guest DJs and food vendors to entertain and feed hundreds of attendees. All the while, Matheson kept stitching new blankets together until even the biggest blanket still felt too small. That’s when the team implemented a BYOB (bring your own blanket) policy for prospective attendees. They later began charging for tickets to help offset event costs, such as security fees and insurance, and selling T-shirts they designed at the events to increase their revenue streams.
Since its inception, Big Blanket has hosted eight super picnics across Houston’s parks, with the most recent event drawing 3,250 attendees to Sam Houston Park. On Saturday, November 15, Matheson plans to host the ninth festival, which will likely draw another record crowd. The picnic continues to grow its online and IRL (in real life) following, with people praising its wholesomeness and novelty, which has even sparked romantic relationships among attendees, he says. While expanding its reach is a goal, Matheson says he hopes the picnic continues to bring people together—just as Blot envisioned.