Seven Years Late

When Sophie was nearly one, she had her first Christmas, and I made her a felt Christmas tree. Turns out I never blogged about it. Weird. Anyway here it is:

I got the pattern/idea from a blog post I'd seen on the internet somewhere. I don't remember where it was now, but I have a vague recollection of actually emailing the original creator for a pattern, and she was Italian. I think. Moving on, it was a pretty simple: felt tree and lots of ornaments. 

Cute baby Sophie loved it. 

At the time, I got it to stand up with lots of bubble wrap that I had lying around. Any year that I put it out, between then and now, I did the same thing. This year, I didn't have any bubble wrap lying around, because I was cleaning out all my family day care gear and had donated it to the local school prep classroom. I tried to stuff it with pillows, but given the round, conical nature of the tree, and the square/rectangular shape of the pillows, it really didn't look great. 

Time to actually bite the bullet. The problem was, I didn't want a huge tree shaped pillow to have to store all year round. That was the reason I didn't make one in the first place. So I considered things, thought about it, procrastinated some, and came up with a solution.

Solution: Make three pillows. Seems complicated, but I figured if I cut the tree shape into three sections, only the top section really needed to be cone shaped (and thus a useless pillow). The bottom two pillows, or tiers, if you will, could just be circle pillows. These circle pillows I could actually use in the lounge room all year round, so I'd only have to store the top conical pillow.

As far as I could see, this solved the storage problem, and also gave us some more pillows for the living room, which were in short supply. 

So I made three pillows. I have plans to actually cover the bottom two with really nice fabric, probably this awesome fruit and flamingo stuff that I made shorts for Sophie out of earlier in the year, and the rest of the whale fabric that became Rachel's first school bag, but I ran out of time before Christmas. Too busy culling toys and selling all the day care things that I no longer needed since I was all finished with that. 

The good news is that inside the Christmas tree, you don't even notice that they aren't covered with fancy pillow cases, so I've still got time. 

The last thing I did was make Rachel her very own stocking. When I initially made the tree, Rachel was a small bump inside me, and we used to call her Yuka Lei, just for fun. But now that she's out and grown into a regular sized small person of six years, it was probably time she had a stocking for the tree to match the rest of the family. 

Better late than never right?