Perfecting Picots

It's been a two steps forward, one step back weekend for me and the Filigree Lace Jacket. I thought after I picked up a bazillion stitches, I'd be on my way to picot-ed perfection, but bad pattern writing or bad picot instruction interpretation have put up a few roadblocks for me.

But to get started, here's what I did accomplish:

Picot Edging on the Filigree Lace Jacket

The edging on this jacket is done by picking up stithches along the entire opening (i.e across the bottom of the front, up one side, around the neck, down the otherside, across the bottom of the second front and around the back). What you see above is the picot edging on the back and the bottom of the first front piece. I would have gone farther, except for an instruction which I know is not quite right... it asked me to pick up every 4th stitch on the neck edge.

Of course, you all know even before I tell you that this means that the edging is going to cause a puckering in the fabric. I, on the other hand, had to figure it out the hard way, by making the mistake with the very unyielding Kidsilk Haze. I think they actually meant that I should pick up three out of every four stitches on the neck edge (or skip every 4th stitch), which will be the next thing I try. The only positive aspect to this mistake was that because I picked up stitches along the entire edge, I could just rip that region out without worrying about dropped stitches or damaged yarn. Even so, I found the ripping experience frustrating enough that I had to set the jacket aside in my knitting room for a while and do some therapeutic knitting on another project.

Before the Filigree Lace Jacket and I reached this unpleasant impasse, however, I did learn something else: I was making my picots wrong on the sleeves. You can see the difference below:

Happy Picots on the Left, Sad Picots on the Right

The picots on the right are like the ones on the sleeves. There's nothing dreadfully bad about them, but I thought they looked a little flat. The picots on the left are much closer to what I think picots are supposed to be. Interestingly enough, there's only one small difference in picot construction between the two... slipping the last bound off stitch after you finish a picot interval back to the left-hand needle. (I know, this doesn't make much sense without pictures to accompany... the picot will be the subject of my next TechKnit pictoral... I would have done it already, but Kid Silk Haze is not the ideal demonstration yarn.)

Because I am so taken with the new and improved version of the picot, I just had to post an extreme closeup:

Picot Profile

I won't be ripping out the picots on the sleeve edges -- I'm going to call it a "design element" and let it go before this sweater gives me a pre-mature case of high blood pressure. If I wasn't working in KSH, I might make a different decision, but I am, so I'm not.

In non-knitting news, John and I saw a falcon perched on the railing of the back deck of the apartment building next door to us. We had to do a double take, because you just don't see birds that big very often around here. Very cool, although I think we'll keep the cats off the balcony for a while. Who says there's no wildlife in the city?!