Spanning interiors, wrapping trees and adorning facades, these big bright red doilies are somehow both conventional and ominous, somewhere between knit holiday sweaters and huge spider webs.

Created by Ashley V Blalock, this Keeping Up Appearances series was started over a half-decade ago and has made its way into various public spaces and museum galleries. They can really tie a room together, so to speak

The series is all about context and intentionally both “anachronistic and antagonistic,” explains the artist. “Although non-threatening in a domestic setting, in the gallery and at this scale, the forms overtake the viewer and loom menacingly. The doilies represent a certain desire to keep up the appearance of gentility expressed through the arrangement of objects in the domestic setting.”

She prefers “crochet, where every stitch is evidence of work by hand. Through her work, she explores themes of discomfort and the coping mechanisms used to provide solace from the stress and trauma of modern life.”

“Inherent is a compulsion to arrange and place and decorate in order to control or influence a perceived outward appearance. The red color gives away the futility of such an act and hints at the unease that exists behind every well-decorated home and lurks below the surface of an obsessive need to control and arrange.”

In many cities, freeways cut through the heart of urban centers like fresh wounds faded to old scars, but what if there were a way to reintegrate the disparate sides across the divide?

The Portland chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded first place to a particularly daring solution to this problem, one that proposes inhabitable fitness infrastructure to close the gap.

Designed by Chadbourne & Doss, the scheme calls for cycling and running tracks, climbing walls, swimming pools and skate parks, all set to hover over the roadways below.

Each section allows for existing traffic flows, working in and around them while mixing new programmatic layers into their midst.

The idea is to use these activities to join both sides but also simultaneously provide a series of iconic structures visible to (hopefully just the passengers of) fast-passing cars on the freeway as well.

The shape of each, being uniquely suited to its purpose, creates a sequence of distinctly different architectural forms experienced in succession.

Whether you want to call it a new art form or a simply a hipster hobby, an artist France is pushing street-side string art in amusing new directions.

Not quite your grandmother-in-rocking-chair approach, Urban X-Stitch creates colorfully cross-stitched pieces along the lines of yarn bombing and knitted graffiti.

So far, these subjects are mostly tame – bright logos and cute animals mixed in with only a few things that look more like spray-painted tags, but the potential is there for something more.

Another neat possible direction in which to take this: pattern sharing between artists and places, the same way cross-stitching in its traditional setting can follow guides and designs.