I am more than a little excited about the eyelet sweater getting to this stage. It may look a little strange but what you are seeing is both front panels now done and joined to the back at the shoulder seams. The seed stitch side of the panels will fold back as I've tried to show. I have to admit that it was a long slog knitting 24 inches of the front panels so a sigh of relief when the second one was ready for the 3 needle cast off that joins front to back. Three more inches knit on the remaining stitches that form a tab that will be sewn around the back of the neckline and joined to the matching tab on the other side; this will turn down and help those front edges of the panels to turn back on themselves. For now, the stitches await on a stitch holder, although I'm not sure why the pattern leaves this step to last. For now, it's on to knitting the sleeves which, because of the drop shoulder requiring a shorter sleeve, may finish fairly quickly (maybe!).
I must admit that after getting the second panel to the joining stage, I took a little break for a few days, then got out the previously joined pieces, laying them out on the coffee table and reviewing in my head how that 3 needle cast off was done. But for 3 days I found I could not face that step of casting off. It's not hard but a bit fiddly and easy to drop stitches, so I kept putting it off, knowing I couldn't do this while watching tv but needing to give it my full attention. On the fourth day, in the morning before I got on with my day, I said enough is enough and picked up my needles. Shortly after I ran across the above internet meme. Oh yes, that describes me especially well, so often the case with things I put off, although this thing was not put off for that long and did take a bit more than 12 minutes.
I've finished the Be Well Zentangles. I'm happy that early on I decided that whenever color would or could be added, I used the same color of colored pencil. The Zentangle people have really gotten into using colored pastel pencils which are easy to smudge from dark to light like a graphite pencil but I've nothing like that among my many art supplies. I'm just fine with how my use of color worked.
Sad to say, these last two struck me as anti-climactic. I guess I was really getting into the over and under complicated looking designs, feeling like we were building from simple to more complicated with each day and these are not exactly that. I do have one extra panel which I've not decided how to use. I actually did not do the "Dream" one correctly, was hurrying along and drew lines into that bottom area with the dots before realizing they were starting another starfish-like thing in there, doing a "save" with the additions of the big blacked out dots. I could give that one another go or make up one of my own. We shall see. If you would like to see the list of all of the themes and quotations, you can find them here.
