One of the more confusing parts of sleeves-inward shrugs is the shoulders. The obvious choice is to eliminate shaping, having the sleeves perpendicular to the body. I don’t find that that shape fits me well, so despite the fact that this is lace, I decided to do short rows.

It’s not as hard as it looks to actually do the short rows, but writing it all out and keeping my place was a little difficult!

Now that I’m through that part, it’s time to begin the body. I’d been thinking of just increasing into the body, but given the limited amount of yarn I have left, I may opt for actually casting on down the sides. Maybe. I haven’t figured that out yet – I really want to keep working in the round, and casting on would require that I work back and forth. I’m sure I’ll figure out something!

At this point, there are 20.5″ remaining in my blank – about 61%. So i need to be really careful how I work into the back and front! I know at this point that I won’t have enough yarn to do the border, so I will be dyeing more for that. It’s been fun watching the colors slowly change as I work from the blank – I just reached the last portion I’d dyed with Aztec Gold, so it’s going to start getting darker from here on out. Pretty neat! It seems like I’ll be out at all the local fishin’ holes quite a bit over the next couple weeks, which should give me plenty of time to work on this. It’s really cool working with yarn you dyed yourself. A lot of my friends dye yarn and I love working with that. There’s really something neat about having some inspiration, putting it down into yarn, and then turning it into a wearable piece. Very cool experience indeed. 🙂