Olympics day 5

Threadybear continues to take shape. I'm about halfway up the body now. Here's the overall progress:

It's about 11" wide across, so I'm going to need to find a large bear to model it when I'm done. The two lighter blues are a little bit more distinguishable in this picture. There's 4 blues in total: the very dark accent colour, the darker shade (A) that's used in rows just above the ribbing, the medium shade (B) which is used in..hmm.. how to describe it. The row near the top with the deep blue and golden brown alternating dots? The rows just below and just above that one are shade B. Then there's shade C which is more of a heathered blue texture. That blue is surrounding the middle row of motifs - the band above the "flowers". Anyway, I'm still having fun knitting it, even though my right arm is starting to ache a little. I didn't do much yesterday, except for weaving in ends, so I'm about a day behind. But this still puts me halfway through the body, so I'm not worried yet.
Here's the fun bits: I've started the steek stitches for the armholes. These are the ones that I'll (eeps) cut into to open them up. I've marked them with the big black arrow. Of course, on Sunday night, I was knitting too late, and sailed past the row on the chart that was marked in green thinking "oh, isn't that pretty". The next morning, I realized that the green line was, in fact, the indication to cast on the steek stitches. So, after ripping back a couple of rows, we're now all set. It was only about halfway up the steek that I decided to always knit the final steek stitch in brown, as well as the first one, as I wanted to really mark where the steek started and ended. Hopefully it'll all be clear when I come to pick up the stitches to start the sleeve.
	And here's the other gratifying bit - the insides. One of the tricks in fair isle knitting is to keep your floats (the yarn that you're not knitting with that gets carried behind the work) as even and relaxed as possible. If you pull them too tight, the garment will get puckered; if you leave them too loose, then things can catch on them (not that a teddy bear is likely to have fingers or jewelry, but even so...) I'm pleased with how even this is turning out.

In other news, I've not been feeling so well the past couple of days. I'm going to rest today and see if I can make it to SNB at Caribou tonight.