Month: September 2020

“Excuse me, but I couldn’t help but notice that strange and interesting plant in the window!” Treetopia invited me to join their “13 Haunting Tales” Halloween tree campaign, and even though I had just completed my edible ornaments tree, I loved the idea of decorating my 7.5 foot Tuxedo Black in the theme of a favorite/classic Halloween character.

You can have a lot of fun decorating a Halloween tree! I went with a colorful monster theme for mine, PLUS most of my ornaments are EDIBLE. Treetopia graciously gave me a pre-lit Tuxedo Black faux Christmas tree. This one is 7.5 feet tall which made me realize my living room ceiling is not that high :P. But the black color is a very nice blank canvas for all of your spooky Halloween scenes. I baked colorful monster sugar cookies and I also put together some gigantic marshmallow bloody eyeballs. I gotta tell you that the house smelled really good!

I know that I’ve been a terrible blogger and haven’t written here since December, but I spent Nov 2019 – June 2020 developing and working on my first crochet installation. I also left my job in social media and now work full time helping a company create video content for artists and makers. But let me tell you all about the installation “Sucre Fleuf!” now on exhibition at Sweet Tooth Hotel in Dallas, TX as part of a group fiber art show called Intangible. This is the first year that the Craft Yarn Council has offered an artist in residency for a handful of amazing female fiber artists to unleash their dreams and creativity in yarn. I’m so honored to be part of this! As I mentioned, we have all been working on our spaces since late 2019. We then met up in Dallas in March for a week to install our pieces, get to know each other, and check out each other’s works in progress. In the show, you’ll find crocheting, knitting, tufting, weaving, latch-hooking, all manner of art in yarn form! It is truly a one-of-a-kind experience. I’ll share photos of the other artists spaces later (check out Sweet Tooth’s Instagram), but for now, I thought I’d let you know what I worked on for 8-9 months. I know you will ask if the patterns will be available, and yes, that is my next project. I want to try self-publishing a little book of crochet patterns filled with bread, cakes, and pastries. Right now my patterns are in a really rough form with not-so-great photography. It’s really re-making the projects and taking photos that makes pattern-writing a whole time-consuming production! Here’s a little video walk-through I made on my phone when Manda and I visited the show in June. Due to Covid 19, we were very careful, and were only in Dallas for less than 24 hours before coming home. I felt very lucky she was able to travel with me. It made the trip much less scary! View this post on Instagram A post shared by Twinkie Chan (@twinkiechan) on Jun 22, 2020 at 2:08pm PDT When I was first asked to participate, I kept thinking that I had to work BIG, on a large scale. However, since I live in California and the show is in Dallas, the idea of shipping something very large also seemed daunting. I sketched a few different proposals for the gallery, and ultimately I realized that my creative wheelhouse is in scarves and amigurumi, and then the idea for Sucre Fleuf! was born. “Sucre” means sugar and “Fleuf” is a a word I sort of made-up that sounds French-ish and refers to the fluff of the stuffing I use and the fluff of a delicious cake. It’s also a bit of a riff on “Sacre Bleu!” It was quite an experience to sketch something out in Photoshop and to see it come to life in reality. Everyone at Sweet Tooth was […]