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Chaos Slowly Becoming Order

Check out that crazy mess.  I’ve been collecting Mail Art supplies for months.  I knew one day there would be a reckoning.  One day, I would have to organize them all.  
Yesterday was my day of reckoning.
This picture was taken at about the halfway point.  And this is only the stuff that made it to the table.  I’m not a natural organizer and often will ask my husband (who is very organized) to help me figure out where to put things.  But I got through it on my own yesterday.  (Of course, there are, like, five messy piles of paper in my studio but let’s not talk about those.)
Chaos temporarily contained.  
This picture isn’t of everything, It’s just the stuff I’m bringing to Osh Kosh, where my friend/business partner and I are running a couple of workshops.  We so love helping people make stuff, love helping them find their creativity.    
Love it!  It’s really exciting.
It’s way worth spending a whole day organizing paper scraps.  
One workshop is Mail Art and the other is Making a Piano Hinge Bound book.  
They books are really cool.  You don’t use any glue or any stitching.   The binding is woven with sticks.
These workshops are part of a private function. But teaching people how to make stuff and helping them to open up their creative side is something we hope to do on a larger and more public scale as Rusted Thread.  
We’re still in the planning stages and it’s not unlike the process of organizing my big mess.  
It’s like chaos slowly becoming order as we narrow in on what we want to be and how we want to be it.  Exciting stuff!
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Quilts Up!

Last night I joined my Modern Quilt Guild at the Alicia Ashman Library to help put up our first annual quilt show!  It was a blast.  I use the term “help” for what I did loosely because my feet were having a bad day, but I did offer some moral support.
Check out the picture on the ad, it’s of one of mine.  🙂
We first piled them up roughly by size.  There are so many beautiful quilts in the show.  At first we didn’t think there would be room for all of them.
After some measuring and figgering we realized we had the room but just barely.  Which is perfect, really.  One doesn’t wish for blank spaces when hanging a show.
There were two basic hanging areas, here by the magazines.
Check out the Mrs’s Courageous Pantses:
They were calmly and coolly hanging stuff up so high that looking at them from the ground made me dizzy.
Up goes the denim quilt I made for the Project Quilting Challenge.
I have to say I feel like mine kinda stick out in that they are the only really heavy, not made out of quilting cotton ones there.  No judgement of either kind of quilt there (I’ve made lighter ones before), just an observation.
How cool is that.  Giant book quilt in a library.
Please indulge my abuse of the panoramic feature.  It’s just fun to do.
This one’s by the bathroom  
And so it this one.  It’s my corduroy quilt.  I almost didn’t get to hang it.  In my mad rush to get out the door, I drilled too wide of a hole on the hanging pole thing for one of the eyehooks.  I threw some wood glue in the hole but there was no time for it to dry and honestly, the glue wouldn’t have done the job for the two months this monster is slated to hang.  It really was unhangable.  It’s just heavy as hell and really needed all the support it could get.  
I brought it along anyway.  I mentioned to one woman there that I need some wire or something to secure the eyehook to the pole and she pulled a short length of wire right out of her pocket.  Quilter to the rescue!  
Who carries wire in their pocket?  I may from now on.  You never know.
The rest are all hanging in the children’s room.
They put all of the most colorful ones there.
There were some improvisational hanging techniques going on since we had more quilts than they had hanging apparatuses. 
This is my favorite one there. (Am I allowed to have a favorite?)  It’s so simple but colorful and I love the layout.
Love it.
How cool is that?
This one matches the wood and the wall so well, it’s like it was made for that space.
Finally, another library appropriate one that fut just right under a spotlight, like it was made to be put there.  
The quilts will be up through the end of June.  I hope you can stop by and see them!