A sweater in 10 days?

My Chinese New Year project is getting close to finished. I have all the main pieces, button bands, seaming done is just eight days! Right now I'm working on the collar. Just have buttons to sew in after that.

The button band was a bit of a challenge. I wanted a doubled fabric for more stability--I don't really like the way buttons pull at single layers of fabric sometimes. This was my first time trying double knitting. I got a pretty good idea of how it works from the knittinghelp videos. Only problems were I had no clue how to cast on or pick up stitches for double knitting and it took me a while to figure out how to make buttonholes.

For the former, I found a tutorial on Stitch Diva. It didn't help me with picking up stitches but reading the cast on section helped. I ended up holding both the main and contrast colors together and picked up stitches. Much simpler than I expected. The buttonhole took some improvising. I finally decided to take a couple DPNs, slip the contrast color stitches for a button hole, and make them for each side separately. I plan on sewing the two sides together with thread later.



The second picture is of the inside. I bound off knit-wise on the wrong side, which resulted in a train track look. Not what I expected, but I like it.