Finished the sweater.

I'm never totally happy with anything, but I'm mostly happy with this.
I cropped one of the sleeves out of the picture, but I swear they're both there. I finished it up tonight while listening to Food Network and feeling sorry for myself for having gone through five hours of contractions that just...stopped. Had to channel the energy I'd expected to use to have a baby somewhere, LOL.

The buttons aren't on it yet, of course. Most of my finished objects yet lack buttons. I'll cart this to Wal-Mart when next we go and pick some out.

I've decided what to do for the next intarsia project. I'm putting a Chinese dragon on the back, and the Chinese pictograph for dragon on the front, and I plan to use frog closures instead of buttons. A real nice Oriental theme, in other words. I've actually got the graph for the dragon sketched out. I had a heck of a time finding something appropriate to use, since the only graph I could find online was horizontal & I wanted something vertical. I finally found a pretty simple dragon on a wall hanging, downloaded the photo, and outlined it in Paint Shop Pro, then transferred it freehand to some graph paper. Right now I'm writing it out so I have written directions to refer to as well as the graph. It's tricolor instead of bicolor like this sweater, and is a much more complicated design, but I'm reasonably confident.

I'm also working on the girls' Halloween costumes. Bobbie decided she and Linda would be kitties, and the new baby (which had better be here by then!) will be a mouse. So we went on a materials trip yesterday. I'm using Red Heart Symphony yarn, a wonderfully fuzzy creation that's surprisingly easy to work with (and, unlike Fun Fur, it frogs quite well), some regular worsted weight yarn (to line the ears), headbands, and floral wire to make a frame for the ears. It's actually a lot less complicated than it sounds. I'm making the headbands that will have ears on them, and then tails that will be stuffed; at least one of them will be attached temporarily to a skirt I crocheted some time ago. Bobbie's is mostly orange (she picked it out); Linda's is more of a brindled brown. That is really what the yarn looks like to me. The baby will have a bonnet with mouse ears crocheted out of some gray worsted weight yarn I have laying around. Depending on how energetic I get tomorrow, I may well finish both kitty costumes. I'll have to do something to get my mind off my lack of labor (I'm due in 1 day, 23 hours, & 30 minutes!).