05 Mar Artist Spotlights: Goodnight Moon | Emilie Odeile and Ken Chapin

The Western installation-fiber-art duo Emilie Odeile and Ken Chapin are so in sync that they regularly finish each other’s sentences. Like when talking about winning an Arts in Society grant through Colorado Creative Industries, to make a life-sized replica of Margaret Wise Brown’s children’s book Goodnight Moon … in yarn.

Emilie Odeile and Ken Chapin in front of Goodnight Moon – A Fiber Tale. Created with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers and the blessing of Thacher Hurd, the life-size knitted installation reimagines the beloved children’s book as a full-size, hand-crafted environment. Photo: Abby Shepard

Ken: We didn’t even tell them on the grant application what it was. All we said was—

Emilie: … It would be a children’s story. We said it would be an art installation. We didn’t say it would be 500 square feet. We didn’t even know that until we started making things and realized—

Ken: … It’s too cramped. So, we enlarged the floor and walls to make the great green room big enough. And, you know, looking at Clement Hurd’s illustration, nothing really makes sense; it’s not to scale—

Emilie: … But it’s not meant to exist in the real world.

Goodnight Moon – A Fiber Tale, installed at the Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, Colorado. Photo: Abby Shepard Goodnight Moon ©1947 and renewal ©1975 Albert E. Clarke III Living Trust dated April 4, 2013 and Peaceable Kingdom LLC

It’s difficult to fully grasp the enormity of what Odeile and Chapin created in their tiny Colorado home (228 square feet), over a five-month stretch, using 152 miles of yarn and nearly six million stitches. Theirs isn’t the first three-dimensional recreation of the beloved children’s story, but it is the world’s only life-size knit diorama of the great green room. We’re talking floors and walls, bears and chairs, kittens and mittens, clocks and socks, a little house and a mouse, a comb and a brush and a bowl of mush, and even the old lady whispering “hush” — every surface was knitted by Odeile over substrates handmade by Chapin. Madness? Maybe.

Odeile hand-finishing a crocheted doll.

Knitted rope used in FROG – A Fiber Situation.

Chapin fabricating a wooden component for FROG – A Fiber Situation.

“My entire career of 27 years,” says Odeile, “has been yarn-based, and about 90 percent of that has been knitting. That’s my personal obsession, so pretty much everything I do involves knitting.”

Chapin, on the other hand, does not knit. “We met on Etsy, actually,” he says with a laugh. “I made giant knitting needles and Emilie was my first customer.”

The “old lady whispering hush.”

“Isn’t that wild?” Odeile says. Actually, yeah, that is wild, and further proof that there is indeed someone for everyone. Watch out, Bumble.

The quick version of their romance is that a friend of Chapin’s suggested, because he’s a woodworker, that he make giant knitting needles, and so he did. That led him to make many giant knitting needles — the world’s largest collection — in a wide variety of sizes (19 to 200), which he sold on Etsy. Odeile’s mother stumbled upon Chapin’s Etsy site and bought a pair of giant needles for her daughter. Chapin started calling Odeile from time to time to ask questions that only a seasoned knitter could answer. After about a year of this, he flew to Los Angeles to, you know, talk to a valued customer in her yarn shop. Six weeks later, they hit the road together and haven’t looked back.

Odeile finishing the knitted rocking chair.

And, yes, you can knit with giant needles. Odeile’s piece, Frog, which is an eight-foot-tall frog holding six-foot-long needles, is a play on the knitter’s term “frogging,” which means to unravel or “rip-rip” (get it?) apart your work to fix a mistake. Frog was made using his six-foot needles.

Goodnight Moon, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2022, has been translated into 25 languages and sold more than 40 million copies. A few of those copies belong to Odeile. “I loved this book growing up, but I had no appreciation for how much other people loved this book,” she says. “I thought this was a selfish idea on my part to combine knitting with Goodnight Moon. But seeing other people’s reactions to it — seeing some people stand and cry in front of it because of what the story has meant to them — I could never have anticipated that.”

Goodnight Moon – A Fiber Tale during its first installation at Space to Create, Trinidad, Colorado.

The installation first appeared at Space to Create in Trinidad, Colorado, in 2023. It made other Colorado appearances at the Boulder Dairy Arts Center in 2025, and at the PACE Center in Parker in March 2026. In addition, Chapin created a project called One Story, Many Voices, inviting people from around the world to record themselves reading Goodnight Moon. To date, recordings in 40 different languages have been submitted. But some of the most heartwarming encounters have been, as one would expect, with children who hug Odeile and Chapin and even profess a desire, thanks to them, to be artists one day, too. 

Many people have an almost insatiable desire to step inside the great green room. For the most part, everyone has been respectful. But there was one wee person who crawled in under the stanchions and had quite a time in the knit room. “I’m a little embarrassed at how devastated I was,” Odeile admits, “seeing that everything had been taken from different parts of the room and dropped in the middle. Clearly, a child had a tea party in there, which means the parents allowed it.” Worse still, the intruder stole the mouse. And the mouse, to anyone who knows and loves Goodnight Moon, is most treasured.

Odeile makes a final adjustment to FROG – A Fiber Situation, a monumental knitted sculpture about “frogging,” or unraveling a work in fiber.

Odeile made another mouse, but it wasn’t easy because she didn’t take notes or create patterns for anything. “Why would I keep notes if I’m just making one of everything?” she says, then catches herself and smiles. “But the lovely part is that we accomplished the heart of it. There’s something about the diorama that’s inviting and very familiar, like it belongs to everyone who sees it. And that feels like a success.”

Currently, the couple’s installation, Stampede, featuring 10 enormous cowboy hats made from knitted filament ropes and eight tumbleweeds made from barbed wire, is suspended from the ceiling at the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art in Trinidad, Colorado. “I took fishing line and knitted it into rope about two inches around, then, using giant knitting needles, crochet hooks, or just my hand, I knitted,” Odeile explains.

Stampede, a site-specific suspended installation at the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art in Trinidad, Colorado.

Together, the couple explores traditional craft and non-traditional materials, giving viewers a new way to see their familiar surroundings. “There’s a tension between craft and art,” Chapin says. “For us, working at architectural scale and in museum settings makes that tension visible.” Their next project will involve industrial fiber used to make roofs for Amazon warehouses and for Google data centers.

“There is this whole other element to seeing these traditional techniques and approaches applied to materials that were never intended for that use,” Odeile says. “I think it has the potential to make people look at materials we’re using differently. You know, things don’t have to be done the way other people do them.”

To learn more, please visit dundeeandlee.com.

Ann Glaser is a Colorado art advisor and writer focusing on contemporary artists of the American West.