How Does Your Garden Grow?

Better than I thought it would! I fell in love with the pattern for How Does Your Garden Grow? at first sight, then had a hard time getting the pdf file to open on my computer...then had to order special green wool just for it...then got totally mystified by the 9 stitch I cord...

I wound up doing 5 stitch I cord with two strands of wool, but by then I'd lost some of my motivation and the "I've got to have one of these" feeling got replaced by "Did I just waste five bucks on wool?" So it sat in my knitting basket for a couple of months and I started to hate it. You'd think that I could look at the picture and figure out that there were 30some leaves, which would mean 60some ends to weave in, and decide maybe this wasn't something I'd enjoy knitting. But I never do that. I fall in love with a potential project and stress over the details later.

Once I finally pulled it out and started the leaves, it went quickly. Even the ends weren't that bad, because they gave me something more entertaining to focus on than the movie Bill was watching on the Spike Network last night. Some thing about flying Chinese warriors with badly dubbed dialogue. Yuck.

My version has less leaves than the pattern calls for. Because I'm short and thought that a less symmetrical arrangement of leaves would look better on me. And because I was sick of knitting leaves and not at all sure that felting was going to make it look any less hideous. The leaves were all distorted and had holes in them from the yarn over increases. The roses were loosely stitched spirals that couldn't possibly hold together in the washing machine.

I should've taken a picture before felting it, but I really didn't think there'd be enough improvement to justify one. Ten minutes in a pillowcase, sloshing around in hot water with a pair of old jeans and I love it just as much as the one in the picture on the pattern. Yippee!