Shawl collar tips

The baby kimono jacket is coming along nicely.

The i-cord edge rolls a little, but I don't care that much since the line of picked up stitches looks fairly neat.

I wanted to share a lesson I learned while working out how to do a shawl collar in a contrasting colour:

First pick up the stitches in the main colour, then start working the collar stitches in the contrasting colour. I found that picking up stitches in the contrasting colour looked terrible because of the gaps left by using only a fraction of the rows of curved neckline and having the selvedge show through.

I used a couple of Knitty patterns (Starsky and Folly) to figure out how to shape the collar with short rows. I knit 1 row in k1p1 rib (including the stitches from the i-cord edging, however I knit the last i-cord stitch and the first picked up stitch together to join the edging to the collar more firmly), placed markers at the shoulders, then did short rows at 2 stitch intervals in k1p1 rib until I used up all the stitches. Be sure to pick up and knit the wraps if you use the wrapped stitch short row technique, or whatever you're doing to prevent holes, while you're making the short rows. I did a couple more rows of k1p1 rib, then used the crochet bind-off. I wanted a firm bind-off edge to help keep the shape, which allows the collar to fold over nicely. We'll see how this looks after washing.