Tree sweater forest

"Yarn-bombing" artists hit a number of Bay Area cities with unexpected and whimsical knitted creations

Most recently, the city of Livermore decided to dip its toe into the movement by hosting a Tree Sweater Forest -- a more mainstream example of this trend, yarn bombers say. The "highly organized and sanctioned" event as Rosendin described it, will decorate the trunks of more than 30 trees located on First Street between Railroad Avenue and Maple and L Streets. San Jose and Santa Rosa have hosted similar events. Installed on Saturday, the tree sweaters will be up until Nov. 22 and then donated to the Valley Humane Society for comfort pieces or bedding for shelter dogs and cats.

I made a trip to downtown Livermore just to see the tree sweaters. It was a Saturday and there were many people walking by and wondering about the sweaters. Here are my favorite nine sweaters (the first two pictures are of the same one). Click on any picture to see it come up in a larger size.

Tshirts into reusable bags

I love reusable bags. I have ten or so, and it's not enough. So when I recently went through my closet and set aside clothes to give away, and found these two tshirts that were too stretched out to keep or donate, I decided to sew them up into bags.

I turned in the sleeves on this one and simply sewed their edges to the shoulders of the shirt. Mostly I did that because it was the lazy way, but it also provides more reinforcement for heavy items.

 Here's a close up of the stitching that holds the inside-out sleeve in place.

Hanging as a bag. I turned the whole shirt inside-out when I was sewing up the bottom, so you can't see the stitching there.

Here is the second shirt. (The purple octopus is saying, "No, you've got it all wrong, AGAIN.") For this one I cut off the sleeves and sewed the raw edges under. However I wanted to keep the original hemming at the bottom so I just sewed straight across it.

Quick garden update

I'd originally used sisal rope to make a trellis for my peas, but between exposure and the dogs and cats squeezing through it, the rope broke in multiple places. Since I have plenty of poultry wire left over from the wheat grass mini-pasture project, I set that up for the next generation of peas.

The potatos that I had planted too early in the year are finally growing! I'm piling on the dirt to get more tubers.