hanging the quilts

Years ago - maybe when we first moved into this condo - I inherited a quilt made by my paternal great-grandmother. I didn't know how to display it, other than that it should be kept out of the light, so I rigged a rack where I could keep it partly folded and displayed in the stairway. But any time it got bumped, it needed to be re-hung.

Then, at Thanksgiving, my mother gave me a piece of embroidery her mother had done, and I knew it was time to do something permanent about hanging these things. During that trip, we stopped at the Folk Art Museum on the Blue Ridge Parkway, where there are always quilts on display, and I saw that they were hung by sewing a sleeve across the top of the back and running a stick through. After tome advice from a co-worker who's a quilter, and some internet research, I found some polyester ribbon I could use as the sleeve, and the instructions on how to do the sewing. It didn't sound hard, and it's not - but it's boring and time consuming (to do both took about four hours), and threading the needle is no easy task with these new glasses (remind me to complain about my new glasses), and I broke the needle threader about 85% of the way through the job (thanks to the gods that I had some beeswax in the drawer).

Still, they're done and hung, and I want to show them off. The one from my great grandmother hangs across the wall at the turn in the stairwell:

I was able to use the rack I'd previously built to hang it. You can see a better picture of the quilt with the rack here. There are a gajillion little hexagons in that quilt, and the large blocks are all color-matched. it's a beautiful thing.

The embroidery hangs on a side wall of the stairwell. It's much smaller than the full-size quilt; at about three feet (one meter) wide, it was probably meant for a crib. Every alternating block has a character from Mother Goose:

Here's a close-up of three of the images: At top, Tom, tom, the piper's son, stealing a pig; then Little Red Riding Hood (although that hat doesn't look very like a hood to me); and Puss in Boots, below:

I like 'em, and I'm glad I have 'em, but I hope I never have to do that kind of sewing again. And quilting will never be among my hobbies.