Tree Cozies at Winterlude 2010

Thanks to Robin Woods for these photos.

Click on the photo to see a larger version.

Tree Cozies

As you know, every year Ottawa holds a winter festival (Winterlude) just to break the tedium of our long, cold winters. This year the organizers decided to decorate some of the trees in the festival parks.  Ordinarily, you might expect the decorations to be lights or streamers but instead, the decision was made to use guerilla knitting instead.  "What's guerilla knitting?" I hear you ask.  Well it's an ad hoc movement by knitters to make others aware of the craft in a public and innovative way by producing knitted items which are displayed in public places, usually unannounced.  Our image tends to be a rather stodgy one but, indeed, we knitters are an artistic and bohemian lot at heart.  And, it turns out, quite a few OHS members are  also knitters.

When the call went out from a local knitters' website for contributions in the form of tree cozies, a group of knitters who are also members of the Ottawa Horticultural Society answered the call.  We raided our stashes of odd balls of yarn and churned out quite a few cozies in no time at all.  One of our members knitted some leaves in various shades of green; another produced some pseudobark in a colour not usually found in nature but most of our creations are garish in the extreme.  Take a look. 

Not all the cozies are by OHS members of course but we know which ones we produced.  We're just not telling others which ones are ours.

If you would like to see the cozies in person, go to Confederation Park in downtown Ottawa and/or Jacques Cartier Park in the Hull sector of Gatineau.

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