The First Sweater Begins

I've got enough stuff on Etsy to satisfy myself for a while, so I'm devoting my knitting time now to MY FIRST ADULT-SIZED SWEATER. It's kind of hard to believe that I've been knitting for over a year and a half now and haven't yet made a grown-up sweater, just a bunch of shrugs and one baby cardigan for Afghans for Afghans. I think it's been the cost of good yarn more than anything that's kept me from sweaters. But now, I've gotten lucky - my parents have requested I knit them sweaters like the kinds they saw in Austria, and they've bought me the yarn to do it with. I've started Dad's first, an oatmeal-colored one that will eventually have dark green I-cord borders but so far looks predictably bland:
It'll eventually be a garter-stitch cardigan that (I sincerely hope) resembles this one, minus the collar:
I found that pattern in a book by the great Elizabeth Zimmermann, aptly titled Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitting Workshop...

... which happens to be my absolute favorite knitting book, at least for now. I spent a good hour while cat-sitting reading about what EZ has to say about shoulder shapings, which I'll need to figure out, since I'm not following the pattern given in the book. There's a reason why I'm not - I want to work it bottom-up rather than top-down, following EZ's excellent formulas for sweater-making. In other words, I'm making up the pattern basically from scratch. It's a leap of faith.