Duplicate stitch the winner.

If I had to do it again, I would duplicate stitch the rose bands and not try to knit in the pattern. In this photo you can see the knitted in shoulders and the duplicate stiched button bands in the same picture. The knitted band took a lot of tweaking and wet blocking to look that smooth.

I have discovered that balling my hands into fists before I put the sleeves on prevents getting fingers caught in the floats. Put your watch and rings on after you don the sweater.

The reason you're not seeing photos of the completed buttonhole band is that I've reached another snag. The buttonholes on the lining don't match up with the buttonholes on the front.

The arithmetic to calculate buttonhole spacing was painful enough; I'm avoiding revisiting that problem. I suspect I should have verified that I had the same exact number of stiches on the front and back before I started. I hoped for the best and you see where it got me.

This knitalong is my first time participating in the knitting blogosphere, and I wish I'd jumped in sooner. I was telling some friends about it at Thanksgiving. Educated computer users, ages 60+ and 90+. Neither one had heard of blogging. (!) The hardest thing for them to get was "Why would anyone else want to read your blog?" The knitalong concept was a little easier to grasp.

Any discussion of why you want to read blogs leads to the Yarn Harlot. We went to her site and found "Mummy's Little Sweatshop" and read it aloud. The whole gang laughed and laughed. I was too shy to admit I read knitting books in the tub, too.