Here is our finished product. Tree 34 with it's sweater and its team, Katie, Aaron, Mom and me.
To recap, this is our tree sweater for A Knitted Wonderland. I recommend reading all my tree sweater blog entries if you missed them the first time. That way you can understand the overall project and see how we got here.
We used the assigned yarns, I Love This Yarn in Orange and Turquoise, Red Heart Kids in Pink and Lion Brand Vanna's Choice
in Olive. I used US Size 7 needles for my portion. I don't know what size hook Katie and Mom used for their portions.
I had two sections with cables. I used a the large middle cable from the Braided Cable Scarf by Miriam Felton in the center, and put two simple cables on either side.
Katie used half double crochet for her portion.
Mom used single crochet on her portion, and Aaron helped us sew the whole thing up.
In this picture you can see the button and the crochet flower I added. To make the flower, I used the Little Flowers with Leaves pattern by Mimi Alelis. I wish I had added a few more flowers around the top. I think it would have added interest without being too distracting.
The day after installation day was the official project debut at Explore UT. Katie and Aaron had to work and Mom didn't want to fight the traffic. We were all pretty tired, and Explore UT is a massive event. But I wanted to see my tree in action badly enough to pay for parking and deal with the crowds.
I followed the arrows (like the one above) and caught the last part of Magda Sayeg's talk. I even helped answer an audience member's question about how long it took to make the tree sweaters. (Basically, I said it took me a month to make half of our tree, but it's hard to break that down into hours.)
After the talk I spent some time outside watching our tree to see if we had any tree huggers. I saw a few people take pictures with it, including the woman above. She took a picture of two little girls posing with our tree. This woman took a picture too. And that's just what I saw while I was sitting on a bench.
Some group was filling rubber gloves with helium and handing them out like balloons. They were all over the place. I saw one kid accidentally let go of his glove/balloon under our tree. It ended up stuck in the branches. The boy tried to knock at the balloon by tossing his water bottle at it before he gave up.
It's amazing the sense of ownership that developed after we put the sweater on the tree. I wasn't too worried about the glove/balloon, but I felt like it was my responsibility to do something because it was in my tree.
I wonder if it's still there. It seems like it would have lost helium and fallen out of the tree by now. Or eventually someone in charge of maintaining the campus would have seen it and gotten it out. There's no way I could reach that with my ladder. (Not that I had it with me during Explore UT.)
On Friday, March 18 it all comes down, and that makes me sad. But my family and I got to be part of something really cool. I'm glad I saw the link on Facebook, otherwise I would have missed the whole thing.
There are links about this project all over the Internet. I'll leave you with a link to all of my pictures and some coverage from The Daily Texan.
A Knitted Wonderland from The Daily Texan on Vimeo.
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