and it will only get smaller

Yeah, I know that doesn't look like a whole lot of progress on the sleeve. But I'm currently decreasing 2 stitches every third round (and will continue to do so unless I find my math was off when I double check it), which is already making a noticeable difference. I'm a bit concerned about the sleeve being too wide, even though I went with what I thought was a reasonable sleeve depth (about 9"). But I'm not changing anything, because it's way too late for that, with those steeks cut and all. If the fit is funny, the fit is funny. It's definitely too early to tell, though.

Here's a closeup of the sleeve decreases:



Because my gauge is so much tighter than in the pattern, I ended up picking up a lot more stitches for the sleeves than they did. This meant that I was left with more than a horizontal pattern repeat worth of stitches, and had to decide what to do about that. I could have added in a partial snowflake on either side of the stripes on the bottom, but decided it would look nicer to just add in a few more stripes, which as you can see are more than halfway decreased away, already. Looking at the wider view, you'll see how those underarm stitches I once placed on stitch holders are incorporated into the underside of the sleeve. I think it's a really neat visual effect because of the stripes. Decreases are done on either side of that section, and I have the beginning of each round start at the beginning of that section. That makes things a tad bit fiddly, since I do color changes (where necessary) at the beginnings of rounds, but have the needles set up so they switch at the direct underarm, which is slightly past the beginning of the round. But it's worked fine so far.

On a barely-knitting-related note, check this out:



Can you spot where I'd have been able to play the word "yarnover" to get a triple word score, if only the word yarnover were in the Scrabble dictionary? Oh the pain! 42 points (and you can see I needed them), and a very cool word, but I couldn't play it because it's not in the dictionary we're using. *sob*