Larch Collar Notes

Picking up the neck:
Round 1, I picked up the neck under the bound-off edge. After knitting a few rows, I found that the collar part was bending backward almost flat, and when pulled up, threatened to buckle. After looking at other people's projects on Rav, I realized that almost everyone had picked up that way, which for a normal collar, might be fine, because you want the WS to show on the outside, but for this one, seemed like it bent awkwardly at the neck join, so it wasn't smooth or flat. I tried to take a pic below, but it's darker at the bend.


So, I ripped back to the bound-off edge:


and tried picking up the neck from the WS, below the bound-off edge, by picking up and purling the back edge bumps. The following pic, shows the top of the bound-off braid:



This next pic shows the braid from the side. So, the top most purl bump is actually the edge of the  bind-off braid. I picked up the purl bump directly below that and purled, to pick up the stitch.

 

This resulted in a nice clean pick-up with a flat edge (Round 2), which looks the same as the sleeve and the hem of the cardigan:




Starting the short-row collar:
Before starting the collar, read over the instructions, and write down the number of stitches you expect to have at the end of each paired set of RS/WS or WS/RS rows, so you can make this section as painless as possible and knit the ribbing checking the add-ons at the end of each row, and just verifying by counting the stitches in the row.

You are adding stitches at the end of each row. I started on the WS row, so I added 6 purl side, then, 6 knit side. The increases are paired so your collar is always even at the end of each set.

Since I picked up my stitches purl side, and I'm making the 35" size, my cheat sheet looked like this, with 41 stitches being the neck stitches (I'm making the 35" size), and the other numbers being the pick-up stitches at the end of the row.:

6 + 41 + 6
       53
6 + 53 + 6
       65
6 + 65 + 6
      77

which taking into account the errata, was the 41 stitch pick-up at the neck, adding 6 on each end; and Repeating 2 times more.

The next round is 4 stitches at each end, so I wrote

85 93 101 109 113 117 121 125

and

129 133 137 141

for 2 stitches at each end for 16 rows adds 32 stitches for a total count of 141 stitches on the collar.

Tips for the collar:
How you know if you've missed picking up stitches, your work will have a taller column of stitches, and there will be a seemingly large gap between the height of the stitches you have and the stitches you need to pick up. This happens if you finish the row and continue ribbing the next row without picking up stitches to close the gap.

For example - this is before the pickup (WS for me):



After pick-up, the picked up stitches seemingly close the gap (far left of the pic - end of my WS row), so the collar stitches tapered down at the end of the row:



This is the view of the other end of the row, which will be the end of the next RS row (the 2nd row of my set - WS/RS), showing the larger gap where the stitches haven't been picked up yet - this is normal:



If I didn't pick up the stitches as expected on the RS, and just did the ribbing back, the next time I was on the RS, my column of stitches at the end of the row would be 2 stitches higher. If I picked up at that time, I would get a hole, because the height of the stitches would be too tall to close the gap.

This was a pic of the first round of my collar with the nicely picked up edge:



Unfortunately, I realized after I reached 109 stitches that I was no longer adding my pair WS/RS, but had switched RS/WS. I went back and found a hole in my work where I had "fudged" the height of the hole, by casting-on sw. I put the neck join sections together and realized, I had 4 stitches more on one side than the other, and it wasn't the side that I expected (the 2nd set). This is why the collar looks so tall. In reality, when you pick up each row, the collar is much shorter.



I really had 4 stitches more on one side. So, I ripped back to the second row of 6 stitches added on to each side, and re- knit.

Well, I ended up ripping back to the cast-on edge. I just wasn't happy with it.

After re-knitting and re-counting, I realized that the collar is not a steep increase the way it looked when I tooked that earlier picture. I had 2 little balls leftover - one from the body, and one from the second sleeve. These I zoomed through. I ended up using a Russian join to  hook the remainder of my yarn in the collar to a new ball. So far, I have used 3 skeins of bugga. I started a fourth well-matched skein today from Verdant Gryphon. The russian join has proved to be more blended than when I used the magic knot. Since the collar is a twisted rib, there are too many holes, where the yarn wants to push through. So far, it's looking pretty smooth.

So, I've knit to 141 stitches, and my collar is 3-1/4" high at the back of the neck. I've still to knit 16 rows of twisted rib, so that will add another 2" to the height of the collar, plenty to turn over as a collar.

Then to seaming..