Saturday Morning Tree Sweater Installation

After having shopped til we dropped at the Pleasanton Quilt Festival, the next morning my daughter and husband and I hot-footed it to the main street in downtown Livermore. Saturday September 27th was the day to install the sweater I'd knitted for the fiber art celebration called the Tree Sweater Forest. Here is a mostly pictorial synopsis of the installation process.

Robin and I are holding the completed tree sweater up to the tree it is to encircle. 

Yep. It is about the right size.

We wrap it around the tree. 

It is quite stretchy so it can be overlapped to shorten it if needed. 

I check to see that the pattern matches when I overlap the edges.

Stitch holders make great super size safety pins. 

I used them to hold the sweater in place while I seamed the edges closed.

The tree sweater must be at least 24" from the ground so it is out of range 

of any male dog who may want to claim it as his own. 

Robin and I do one more placement check.

I started by crocheting the seam closed so removal would be easier. 

I did not like the look so I switched to sewing with a yarn needle.

It was easier and the seam was almost invisible.

I cannot leave out the supervision step. 

My husband is behind me checking out that all is well.

There are just three more stripes to sew. 

I needed to tie off to add another length of yarn.

Robin helps me measure and cut off more yarn.

I need to use a ladder for the last bit up top.

Voila! One tree fully garbed in an Autumn Rainbow.

It appears as if the tree trunk is peeking out between each stripe.

This was a fun project.  I will remove it from the tree right before Thanksgiving. It will be donated to the Valley Humane Society as a comfort blanket for animals up for adoption. The finished dimensions were about 32" wide by about 48" tall. I call it German Shepherd size.

I still have enough of the yarn that I could make another afghan for my family at home. Do I want to do that? Nah! Been there. Done that. However, another tree sweater in another design next year... now that would be fun!

Crafty Weekend with My Daughter

My daughter was here this past weekend visiting from Oklahoma and we had a great, fun-filled, crafty weekend: a quilt/craft/sewing festival, a tree sweater installation, a quilt show with over 200 quilts displayed, and a quilt class. For today's post, first up is the festival on Friday with scores of vendors and the purchases I made. There will be more about the other activities in future posts.

We hit the ground running. Robin's flight got in at 12:05 pm on Friday, September 26th and we went directly from the airport to the Pleasanton festival. The show closed at 5:00 pm and I estimated we needed about four hours to take it all in. My husband usually accompanies me to these events. After all he is the CEO – Carries Everything Out. He came along this time too, with both of us, and said he thoroughly enjoyed watching my daughter and me interact and feed off each other's excitement.

So here is a pictorial summary of what I bought. First, there are the impulse buys because of the bright, clear, whimsical color palettes I love. The little Volkswagon bugs were just too cute to resist. I bought them at the Laurel Leaf, which has such an extremely appealing way of packaging their fat quarters. I get drawn into buying at least one of their fat quarter bundles of six or eight coordinates every time they are at a show I attend. The bundles are not always pulled from the same fabric line, but the owners just have an eye for bundling fabrics pleasantly. Here is a peek at this cutie combo. I bought extra yardage of the stripes just because I thought they were so crisp and had such a tickle-your-fancy color combination.

I bought this Kate Spain yardage at the Twisted Scissor Quilt Shoppe booth. The colors are luscious and seeing the bunny, bird, and humming bird silhouettes in scalloped stripes won me over.

Switching from a spring palette to a Christmas one, here is my jolt of the holiday spirit. Who could resist Whimsy Santa hugging the tree in one pose and using it as wings in the next? I bought three fat quarters of those primary colored Christmas balls because they, too, called to me and there is just something about that triangle fold presentation that tips the scales toward the purchase direction. I also bought a Christmas train panel for my husband and a panel to make quilted Christmas stockings as wall decor, but I did not take photos of those items.

There is another vendor, called Second Chance Fabrics, that is stocked from quilters who want to de-stash. I bought this 2¾ yard piece of flannel for baby burp cloths or the backing of a baby quilt. I just liked the offbeat print. It, too has a bit of a Christmas vibe to it.

Next up were my purchases from the Fabric Chicks. Each vendor seems to have its own personality. Last year I bought some funky monster-colored orange, neon green, and eerie yellow graphic distorted spot and squiggles mini-prints at the Fabric Chicks booth. This year this wacky chicken fabric on the left just called to me, especially paired with those black spots on orange background in the upper right. I just plopped those lightning bolts from the Twisted Scissor Quilt Shoppe in the lower right portion of the photo because they were orange and black; but, I think they are destined for another quilt. Fabric Chicks are funky; Twisted Scissor is more whimsical. Each vendor has it personality – you won't find Civil War fabrics at either of these places.

That fabric with the black spots on orange, because of the spots' irregular shape and spacing relative to each other, reminded me fondly of a book that was a childhood favorite of my kids, Put Me in the Zoo by Robert Lopshire. Can you see the spot similarity?

Here is section of a black/white/red quilt I made with a stack and whack technique for my nephew. See those graphic black squares with the dominant white squiggles? I have some of that stylized chicken fabric left over. I plan for it to go with the preceding chicken print and black spotted orange. You can see the whole black/white/red quilt in my post for November 26, 2011. Some of its fabric leftovers also went into my Grinch Quilt.

And by the way, here is the text of that Put Me in the Zoo book. Maybe it will spark some memories in you quilters out there with kids and grandkids. My daughter Robin loved it as a child. I think she can recite it almost by memory to her own daughter, who loves it too. As her Grandma, I have also read it to Autumn long distance over Skype. See what feelings a few splotches on a scrap of cloth can conjure up? Just one of the reasons I love quilting and fabric.

My daughter did not escape the buying bug either. She may post about her purchases too in her blog Robin Loves Quilting. She does have a toddler, though, so her time is pretty limited.

To rest up from my busy weekend, I plan to write more posts about it and visit other blog entries for this Wednesday's Work in Progress at Freshly Pieced. I will also begin to restore order in my sewing room that is now in shambles. I'd cleaned in preparation for my daughter's visit so we would have cleared surfaces available for displaying and considering our hodge-podge of ideas. While auditioning my stash and patterns for projects, she and I decimated the tidy fabric piles in my closet, scattering them throughout the room. Little girls play with dolls. Grown women with play with fabric. Both make for very merry messes. I loved the bedlam. I miss her already.