Picot Progress

As the Beatles were fond of singing...

I get by with a little help from my friends...

And that's definitely the truth today. Thank you very much to everyone who posted suggestions yesterday. I tried most of them and ended up discovering what I had been doing wrong -- and coming up with something that was not entirely unlike the instructions for the project.

What was I doing wrong? Well needle size was a factor on my test swatches. I knit the swatch on 5 mm needles and tried to do the edging on 4 mm. When I dropped down to 3.75 mm the distortion disappeared a bit more. I suspect that 3.5 mm would have mostly eliminated it.

But actually I was missing something far more critical, that was made more clear to me by looking at the discussion of the picot cast off in Nancie Weisman's book The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques -- a slim but very useful volume that I had forgotten to look in.

The critical part of these picots is casting on extra stitches and binding them off. Well, for some bizarre reason, I cast the stitches on, and then bound them off without knitting into the stitches (i.e. just by slipping the cast on stitches over each other). If I had done a real cast off, I would have been a lot more successful. I also think there is an error in the picot edge instructions and ended up modifying them to what worked, rather than how they read:

CO 2 stitches, **Cast On 3 stitches on the left needle. Cast off 4 stitches, K2Tog, slip first stitch over K2Tog stitch, repeat from ** until all stitches are exhausted.

It worked so well on my test swatches that I actually got daring enough to try it out on my sleeves:

Happy Picot Sleeve Edging

And a close-up that really proves the point:

Picot Up Close and Personal

Those sleeve edges are the easy part... The next involves picking up and adding the picot edge to the back and front edges and neckline -- it's going to be a challenge just to find a needle that I can get all the stitches onto, because you literally pick up all the edge stitches in one go. But now that I've made it past the mental hurdle, the physical knitting part should go much more smoothly!