New Displays

There's something about the spring that makes one want to do, well, spring cleaning.  Maybe it's the clear skies, the longer days, or just all the flowers blooming that makes freshening up seem like a good idea.

I started with my closet.  I actually don't have that many clothes so it didn't take long.  I just pulled everything out one by one, checked to see if it fit, and if it didn't, into the Goodwill bag it went.  Well, almost.  I did keep a couple of "5 pound" skirts that I really like, and will be able to wear again if I lose maybe five pounds.  But just two of them.  Otherwise having a closet of clothes that you need to lose weight to wear is just depressing.

Then came my handspindles (the ones I use for spinning yarn).  They have lived in a basket on a side table.  Sort of all jumbled together so I have to dig for the ones I want.  And sometimes the cats knock it over.  We were in an outlet store and I spotted a quarter-round wire bathroom rack--so I bought two of them, put them together with zip ties, and hung them on the wall.  My less-interesting spindles (the ones I use for teaching) went into storage and my nice ones went into the rack.  Done.

The project for the last two days was slightly more involved.  There's a hallway in the house where we hang pictures.  I was sort of tired of some of them, but moving and rehanging seems like a bit of a bother.  There's a display system that I've seen from time to time and really liked, and we decided to put it in.  Basically, you make a shelf with a lip and rest your pictures on it.  You can even stack them--a look I rather like.  And rearranging them is easy.  Here's where we started:

It seemed simple enough.  Build a couple of shelves with lips.  Take down the pictures.  Put up the shelves.  Put back pictures.

Shelve building--check.  Take down pictures . . . . wow.  The reason we didn't have much problems with the pictures going askew was that many generations of spiders have glued them to the wall with webs.  So I had to evict the living spiders and clean out the webs.  The wall looked a little grungy so I had to wash it. Then the baseboards looked grungy so out came the steam cleaner and toothbrush.  And when you live with something day to day, you don't really see it any more--so I had never noticed the little pyramids of dust on each picture frame, so they all had to be cleaned.

And now that this wall was clean, the other side of the hallway looked grungy--so those pictures came off and were dusted and those walls and baseboards washed.

I have often mentioned that I lack the "clean gene."  Some people can clean their houses and they have, well, a clean house.  Anytime I clean I just uncover more dirt.

But at last, the shelves went up and the pictures (with some changing) went on, and yes, indeed, it is a look that we like.  There are a few more pictures to go up as soon as I print and frame them.