What a weekend of not-skiing will do

I finished the body on the Pea Pod sweater last night. As you can see, the back and fronts are knit in one piece, with sleeves and the collar added later. The front is asymmetrical, with the leaf lace panel roughly centered and the closure to the side of it.

I’m thinking buttons somewhere in the brown to orange spectrum will look great. I started the first sleeve, and aside from some mixups in the lace, it’s been flying. (I should know better than to knit the first few rows of lace patterns while reading, it always goes awry.)

I’m debating what to knit next after this. We have friends getting married in Costa Rica, and we’re going to have a beach vacation. (Can’t tell you how much we’re looking forward to the sun!) I’m guessing I’ll run out of things to knit on this within a day or so of arriving, so I need more vacation knitting. My top candidate has been the Baby Surprise Jacket, but I didn’t realize you couldn’t buy the pattern directly from Ravelry. 🙁 We’ll be going on vacation before the mail-order version could arrive, and I’m opposed to buying any more Elizabeth Zimmermann books. (I keep giving in and buying them based on one pattern that I like, but the two that include the BSJ are quite a bit more expensive and I’m just not that big a fan of the rest of the patterns.) I put a hold on it at the library, but the next book’s due date is the same day our flight leaves, so that seems really unlikely to pan out well. Barring some library miracle, I think I’ll probably give up on the BSJ for now, and instead use the Yarn Harlot’s Daisy sweater as a base and incorporate some sort of fun “interest” out of Knitting on the Edge? And use cotton out of stash, since wool won’t be as nice to knit on the beach? Decisions…