Monday, May 14, 2018

Once in a Blue Moon - Part Five

This is part five of the blog series about making "Once in a Blue Moon" quilt with LED battery operated lights.

OK, so I had the quilt done.  I had the extended sleeve with the swimming noodles done.  The final step was to really figure out how the quilt would hang in the show with the hanging devices used by our quilt guild.

We use lanyards with relatively flat curtain rods to hang the quilts from the top pole.  The only thing that goes through the sleeve is the relatively flat curtain rods.  There is a black curtain that hangs off the top cross piece, so the quilts are not hanging against a hard flat wall.  If I was designing the hanging apparatus for my home, I would use a stiff board through the sleeve and staple the extended sleeve to the back of the board.  This would insure that the quilt itself was sticking out from the wall enough so that the battery packs would not distort the top.  So, the key was to somehow replicate this with the noodle and the sleeve.

Gosh, I love having this type of problem to think through.  It really appeals to my engineering brain (did I ever tell you all that I have a mechanical engineering degree?).  On the other hand, the creative side of my brain does NOT let me sleep when there is a design element that needs to be resolved.  So after several nights of not being able to go to sleep and/or waking up and not being able to turn off my brain, I came up just the perfect idea.

I am going to support the quilt with a hanging sleeve that is in sections.  And I'm going to support the extended sleeve with smaller hanging sleeves that will fit in between the ones that the quilt is handing on. Close to loops actually.  I'm going to position the top noodle so that it hangs on the back of it's hanging loops and holds the top of the quilt out from curtain.  Well, that's the idea anyway.  Here's my sketch of the idea.

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