Chuppah, chuppah, chuppah

Those of you who know Guido and his Pumpkin know that they are getting married in a couple of weeks. Since they are both knitters, they had decided to knit their own chuppah. They spent the winter looking for a pattern, doing test swatches and choosing the yarn. Guido, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the actual knitting started around April. Unfortunately, they are both super busy all on top of the fact that they are getting married. By about mid-August they’d figured out they were going to need a little help getting this project finished. Enter Team Chuppah.
Now, Patience, Kimberly and I are all helping them get the chuppah knit. Doria, bless her for a saint, is sewing in all the ends (my section alone used 13 skeins of yarn). Since I’ve got the most available knitting time, I’ve been helping with finishing up Guido and Pumpkin’s sections as well as doing the edging and grafting all the sections together.

You may be thinking that this sounds like whole lot of work and it is but it is also a joy to work on. The pattern (Lucy Neatby "Falling Leaves") and the yarn (Web's house brand alpaca/silk blend) are both a delight to work with. On top of that is the satisfaction of being able to help out two dear friends with their wedding!

So here’s where we are so far:
My section is done.

Pumpkin’s section is done.

I’d removed the lower edge of P’s section and grafted on the leaf edging.

This was good practice for grafting the mains sections and convinced me that I wanted to graft on a different row than originally planned so last night I removed about two rows from the bottom of my section and today I am planning to graft it to Pumpkin’s section.
Patience’s section should be done any minute and so I will do the same row removal and grafting to that section. Kimberly’s section should be done by next weekend by which time, I should have the remaining half repeat of Guido’s section plus its leaf edging done. That means, that we may have a finished, grafted, ends sewn in and blocked chuppah to present to the happy couple a few days before the wedding! Wish us all luck!
I’m hoping to have Patience’s section grafted by Tuesday evening when we are having a “chuppah fitting” at the florist. This is when we all come to grips with the reality of setting this thing up on the chuppah frame. It cracks me up that we are having a chuppah fitting. You think of having a dress fitting before a wedding but a chuppah fitting?
BTW, Guido is going to do a podcast on Sunday about what it’s like to do a big project and about working on the chuppah in particular.