This is easier than you could ever imagine.
When working your dog sweater, after you have knitted 3-4″ in, on a RS row, find the center stitch of your work. Back up two stitches from there and bind off 4 stitches, then finish the row. Working back on a WS row, when you get to the bound-off stitches, cast on 4 stitches and keep working to the end of the row.
That is it! When you have finished the sweater you can single-crochet or slip stitch around the opening to give it a little finesse, but that is optional.
Right before Christmas I found these amazing porcelain skully beads at Savannah’s Paris Market and just had to find something to do with them. I bought a couple for April and me to string on silk cords and wear around our necks, but I really had Willie’s neck in mind. How could I make my little man a collar to match his personality? Thus was created “Bad to the Bone”. I couldn’t leave out sweet Chopsticks either, so a trip to JoAnn’s later I had the ingredients for “Sweet Hearts”, a collar for my camera-shy but precious older pup.
This week I worked up these two cute collars for my babies, and thought you might want to do the same for your kids ~ pups or kits. There’s a free pdf download somewhere on this page (they make them hard to find here at WordPress). The collars are easy to put together, and there are endless combinations of yarn, fabric and bibbity-bobbities to put around their necks. They wear just like real collars, but bear in mind I walk my dogs on harnesses, so the collars are more for identification and fashion. If your dog’s collar gets a real push-me pull-you workout at the end of a leash, I would suggest stitching your felt creation to a solid webbed collar and skipping the lining.
And the dogs will wear them. Honestly, when it came time to write this tutorial and I needed the collars for measurements and such, the kids were positively bereft at having to give them up. Ain’t parenthood grand?
