Art, Craft and Needlework, July 2021

[Harriet]

Welcome! Nancy mentioned heat as a factor that's affecting her days lately. July, for many of us, is a month that keeps us inside and maybe gives us an opportunity for creativity!

Inside with your lovely creations, how do you DISPLAY them? Do you have items that you have made adding beauty to your home? Hanging on walls as artworks, or offering something practical like kitchen items or couch pillows, etc.?

When you look around your home, what reminders do you have of your creativity? Do you have plans for more? Do tell!

[Nancy]

For my creative ventures this month I am embracing some writing one book July has begun.
I have a journal that I am starting getting some notes on a book I have ordered and a journal.
Getting some perspective on my life and it is helping yea for progress!

My creativity room is one I am not in so much these days but I sneak in a few min. at a time for this or that.
I have been declawing the paper tiger.
I will be setting up another half page size journal when I can get to that room again I have supplies in there.

[Harriet]

Nancy, that is me, too, with a paper tiger to declaw. I even allowed some patterns ( McCalls, Simplicity, etc) to go, deciding that I will never make those particular clothing items again, and if I really want to, there will be other patterns. I don't have to be the storage place for them.

I've lived with regular wallboards here made of the everyday sheets (sheetrock?) you can just push a pin into if you want, so displaying has not been hard here. Also, my late dh put up two wooden drapery rods on which I have been able to hang large quilts all this time. Not so at my parents' 1958 house to which we'll be moving. The walls are plaster , so there's much, much more thinking that will need to go into hanging anything there, so that you don't make a crack. Also, plaster walls make more of an echo, so having textiles around would be even more helpful than they usually are!

So, I've been looking at ideas to help with hanging and have settled on this method with Command strips plus specific metal pieces. It seems the least expensive, least likely to mark or hurt walls, and easiest to change.

I've also got to think carefully about the largest living-area walls at my parents' house, which are south-facing with several windows. I'm spoiled by large north-facing walls in rooms with a porch outside those windows, that didn't ever worry me too much about fabric-fading. hmmmm... .. So I've got the perfect, large spaces for wall art but probably shouldn't put textiles there!

I'm also thinking of doing more with cabinets with glass fronts that can show some stacked quilts. But it's almost funny that I really also need glass-front cabinets for breakable/old pieces, too, you know? And lots of people use them sensibly for books! I can't have a whole house full of them, even if I could afford it! lol

And in the closet there, we found an old white frame for a half-canopy that was over my bed as a child. Neither of the sons threw it away all these 5 years they lived there, because they didn't know what it was! lol! It looks like a ladder, and I think it will make a "quilt ladder" to hang some quilts. I've never had a quilt ladder, but have admired them in magazines and quilt shop displays.

Right now, it's just a matter of boxing up and getting moved, though! If you came to see me now, you would have to play "Marco-Polo" to find me among the stacks!

[Nancy]

U turn bc of fires ! told some friends they could come here I had room so that is going to change the focus.
But I am still trying to knit some rows every day or so on dish cloths.

At knitting group they told me I could put some at a sale table in the fall near by not sure what I am doing with all the dishcloths
I have that stacked up but need to do some thing with them.

[Twins' Mom]

Interesting hanging method Harriet, I don't quite get what holds the quilt onto that bar? Is it the little prong thing?

I wish I had more wall space upstairs in my bonus room over the garage.

I stamped up there some yesterday trying to replenish my stock of cards. It's for ten minutes before we go somewhere when dh asks me if I have a birthday card. Also cleaned up the stamping area. I still had designer paper out there from the two or three Christmas cards that I make. I did not get all the scraps refiled, but did put away all the stamps and dies I had out and generally get the desktop mostly cleared.