How to hang a quilt
Nico was gifted with an amazing handmade Very Hungry Caterpillar quilt last year and I've always intended to hang it in his room since he still doesn't use blankets. I poked around online looking for good ways to hang a quilt and finally decided to follow the steps outlined below. I had my mom sew a long strip of fabric to the backing, along the top, to serve as a pocket for a length of 1/4" diameter PVC pipe. I had this genius idea to wrap picture wire at each end of the pipe and then fashion a loop to hang on hooks on the wall.
Mistake #1: buying a house with 1940 plaster walls. When I removed the previously-placed picture-hanging hook -- as carefully as I could -- it popped a huge divot of paint and plaster out of the wall. Then when I tried to drive in new small nails for the loops, they bent in half and also left divots. Immensely irritating.
Mistake #2: the tube pocket (okay, that sounds gross) was too high up on the back. I couldn't use proper picture-hanging hooks because they'd show above the edge of the quilt.
Mistake #3: trying to forge ahead with the picture wire, which was a giant pain in the ass and eventually sliced open my pinkie finger.
After I gave up on the wire, I tried running a length of quilting thread through the pipe and tying loops at both ends to hang on the nails, but I couldn't get the loops close enough to the pipe ends. Finally, I stitched small safety pins upside-down at the top corners and used them as loops.
So far so good, though I'll be checking periodically to make sure the pins aren't pulling or damaging the backing of the quilt. If that happens I'll try re-stitching them to the pipe pocket instead. I really hope this works, though, because I'm kind of ready to be done screwing with it. Plus I can't ever take it down, because now there are three big ugly divots in Nico's bedroom wall. Dammit. But the quilt does look pretty amazing, so I suppose it was worth the hassle of hanging it.
I hung up the comforter that came with our crib set. I found in a sewing store a package of little plastic loops, about the size of nickels---I can't remember what they were designed to be used for, but I sewed several (three? four? memory long gone) to the back of the comforter and hung it from a line of nails. Frustrating part: getting the loops in a straight line AND the nails in a straight line.
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