Follow along with me as I participate in the 2024 Save Your Story Challenge by Quilt Alliance. You can find all of my blog posts that are part of this challenge.
Next up for the Quilt Alliance Save Your Story Challenge – Displaying Your Quilts. The email arrived on August 17 with the full details:
I’m focusing this blog post on what I do when I need to hang my quilts, and how I have used varying hardware over time. I feel that it is still a learning process, figuring out how best to hang my quilts in various locations for different displays.
For quilts I place on my front door (such as my Endangered Species Act quilt collection), it is as simple as placing a dowel rod through the quilt sleeve and use 3M hooks to hold up the quilt. Soon, I started purchasing curtain rods to put through the quilt sleeves, as the dowel rods would become warped and would not allow the quilts to hang straight (straight enough for my front door, but not for larger quilts). The curtain rods easily would sit in the curved part of these hooks that I found in the Bathroom Accessory section of Bed Bath & Beyond. I show them in this slideshow.
The stand you see in the final image of the slideshow is actually a stand for paper rolls or a fabric background I purchased online through B&H Photo. It was so hard to find something I could use to display hanging quilts, something that could be easily moved and transported. This stand isn’t bulky and is easy to set up and break down. I purchased several which allows me to display more than one quilt at once.
But then, all the Bed Bath & Beyond stores closed by me, and I couldn’t find these same hooks to order online. A search on Amazon led me to find S hooks that curved better around any poster frame or my B&H Photo stands.
These S hooks are working extremely well and allow for me to quickly hang quilts once I insert a curtain rod in the sleeve on the back of my quilts (there have been a few times where I have traveled with the curtain rods already placed in the back of the quilts, saving time when setting up a display).
The stands I ordered from B&H Photo have been great to work with when I set up local quilt displays, but I’ve been bringing multiple quilts to other locations that involve flying with quilts and stands. So I purchased new backdrop stands on Amazon that were a bit smaller that could hanging only one quilt each, and a piece of luggage that I can put those stands in along with the quilts when I fly (I really do love this Pelican Air case!).
There were a few times where my quilts were on display without me being present, for several hours or several days. When I am a little nervous about the security of the quilts, I decide against using the S hooks (too easy to grab a quilt and go), and I instead use VELCRO cable ties. This way, I can secure the curtain rod as close to the cross bar as possible. Anyone trying to remove the quilts would have to spend some time removing the VELCRO, which hopefully would discourage anyone from doing so. The photos in the slideshow below are when I used the VELCRO strips when I put quilts on display in my campus library – which I wasn’t afraid of security there, I just always hate leaving my quilts behind anywhere, at any time! Of course, for the quilts that have a sleeve to begin with, putting the quilt sleeve through the hanging bar offers the most security, but I need to be more mindful about how wide the cross bars are and how much fabric I need to use for a sleeve.
The most unique way I had to approach hanging quilts was when I was invited to display my quilts in the art gallery at Jenkins Arboretum in Devon, PA. This gallery displays photography, paintings, etc. So the hardware in the room is ready to hang something that is set in a frame. Fortunately, the staff and volunteers at the Arboretum were wonderful to work with and quick-thinking! We still utilized the dowel rods, as they fit easily in inverted large binder clips. Then, the round end of the binder clip was able to hook over the picture hanger. The display looked great!
In summary, displaying my quilts is definitely a challenge! As all of my quilts are of different sizes, some have sleeves and some do not, some displays are in driving distance while other places I have to fly or take a train… but I’m always up for the display challenge, if it provides me an opportunity to share the science stories I’ve captured in my quilts (that’s just the Earth science educator in me!).
Journeys of Dr. G 
Thanks, Laura. These are great options. Off to google that Pelican case!
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