Have Your Say

After including our story ‘Creative Ways to Finish & Display Your Needlework’ in All Stitched Up! issue #244, we were delighted to hear your thoughts on how to display your finished embroidery. It seems that many of us face the endless difficulty of balancing the desire to have our pieces hanging on the wall with the practicality of not having enough wall space! 

In fact, K. Coleman went to all the effort of sending us an extensive A-Z list of different ways to display embroidery. Some of our favourites from the list included canvas sneakers, flour sack drying towels and television screen covers. The ingenuity and imagination this list displayed was superb – we could easily be stitching until the end of our days and still not have managed to do all of them!

Clare Muzzatti offered a fascinating solution. She suggested a 4-page, concertina style book which is free standing and joined by ribbon. Each book can display 8 finished pieces and Clare’s suggestion was that you select a theme – perhaps Christmas or landscapes, and group together completed projects which fit the theme. We loved this idea and could imagine switching the books on display whenever the mood took you.

Linda Devaney made use of an old brick mould which then acted as a ‘frame’ for multiple, postcard-sized embroideries which looks fabulous. We have also seen something similar done with old typesetter’s cases, but any kind of box or frame with multiple compartments could work. Linda clearly took great pleasure in finding projects that would fit into the spaces of her brick mould, even securing fine linen in order to get the dimensions just right.

So many of these ideas we hadn’t even thought of and it has allowed us to look at some of our current WIPs (works in progress) to determine whether we could use one or two of the ideas you’ve offered.

Display is all about getting pleasure from your finished work, but Pat Demharter posed a larger and perhaps more important question. She wanted to know what might happen to our needlework after we have gone. What provisions have our readers made? Do our heirs know how to protect needlework? Or will they even care? 

One great fear of many a stitcher is that once they have gone, their work will end up in a charity shop or worse, in a skip bin somewhere. Pat would love to hear from anyone who has already thought through this process and perhaps even put something in place to ensure their work is protected. You can email us at news@inspirationsstudios.com with your thoughts and comments.

In the meantime, we encourage you to enjoy each stitch of the journey and each moment of pleasure you get from seeing your work displayed. Ultimately, we can’t completely control what happens after we have gone, but hopefully we can instil enough love and passion in our needlework for future generations that we will have no need to worry.