vest approaching realization

It's a crappy picture, but you get the idea.

I ended up using some intarsia and some stranding on the colorwork portions of this vest. The little brown triangles were easier to do using intarsia; they didn't ever get wider than 9 stitches, and each skein of Sulka is only 55 yards, so I skipped winding bobbins and just used two separate balls of brown and stranded the white across. The colorwork was inspired by a "flying geese" motif that I saw in a book about Salish weaving. I decided to let the v of the geese fall on the two fronts and let it be a plain brown stripe in the back. However, because of the white buttonband and the white interruption in the brown stripe, I had to do a little fudging and carry the white all across the back of the brown, as you saw yesterday in my (even crappier) iPhoto picture. I'm not super happy about my tension in the intarsia and I should have gone up a needle size for the stripe, but I have gotten a lot of questions and compliments on it so far, many from non-knitters.

As far as shaping... I decided to do some waist shaping, since this is such a bulky yarn and my body type really needs a little waist shaping for a flattering fit. I did it by doing a double decrease at the sides every 3 rows until the piece measured 9", then increased two stitches at each side (again, every 3 rows). With a gauge of 4 st/inch, that turned into a lovely nip at the waist, since I decreased from 40" down to 32". I'm on my second to last increase for a final circumference of 37", for just about zero ease.

I haven't decided yet how I'm going to close it. I'm thinking either toggle-and-loop (since I'm not knitting in any buttonholes) or zipper. Any thoughts?