A wedding gift for my Mom and her groom. It’s an ambitious project, but I have over 7 months to do it. As long as I can keep knitting through the summer months, I should be okay.

12/26/2011
I powered through and finished a week before Christmas. I’m so pleased with how it turned out! I was a little bit nervous to wash it (even though I’d done a test swatch) but it turned out really nice and soft.

10/27/2011 I’m about 60% done: one more flower garden section and one more tree section to go. The wedding was in October, so there was no way I’d have finished it on time. My current goal is to finish it by Christmas. I have to average 2.5 rows a day to do it (which is about an hour of work), so I’m counting on getting some marathon sessions in. I love how it’s turning out, but I can’t wait to be working on other projects again.

05/15/2011 I just started the first flowers in the flower garden section. I was really confused by directions, and there’s no good close-up of the stitch detail in the pattern, so I couldn’t figure it out. This thread in the Tree of Life Knit-a-long group was really helpful. It looks like the wedding won’t be until next spring, so I have extra time to do it. Which is good, because I’m behind.

01/12/2011: I’ve got about 3 inches. At this rate I should finish in about 5 months, so that’s promising. I can’t wait to get to the cabling though! The rows and rows of knit and purl are getting tedious.

Mods: I’m doing a moss stitch border of about 1 inch all the way around. So I started with 5 rows of moss stitch and I’m maintaining 4 stitches of moss stitch on each side. The tulip border is pretty, but I was afraid it would be the difference between finishing the project on time and not.

My gauge has fewer stitches per inch, but that’s okay. A few more inches won’t hurt, and I like how the fabric is knitting up, so I’d rather not change the needle size.