My absolute favourite cast-on for circular shawls is the Invisible Loop cast-on. TechKnitter has an absolutely fabulous blog-post about how to work the cast-on. The reason I like this cast-on so much is that it’s relatively simple to do. And when you work the first few rounds of a circular shawl, it is not very tight, and allows you to wiggle the needles around. In the beginning it will look like you have a big hole in the centre of your shawl, but fear not – at the end when it’s time to sew in the ends, you pull the cast-on end and the hole disappears like this:
Afterwords, all you do is sew in the loose end. I like to loop it a few times through the centre stitches, and then duplicate-stitch the stitches around the centre, before I cut the yarn. It’s completely invisible and results in a neat centre that stands up to scrutiny.
