Blackberry-stitch tea cosy: picot edge

This post is the second instalment of the tale of my blackberry stitch tea cosy.

The beginning

I cast on 54 stitches, but eight rows of stocking stitch (stst) later, I hit my first problem: a picot row.

Picot row

I had no idea what a picot row was, let alone how to pronounce it. I looked it up. It’s borrowed from French, so the t is silent: /piko/. It seems a picot edge is a kind of frilly edge to something. I was to create a hem later, folding the knitting over at this row, so that explained that.

I found the picot row tricky to knit. There were still 54 stitches on the needle (phew). The instructions said to knit one stitch (k1). Ok, easy. Then alternate these two steps until there are two stitches left:

picot edge knitted by Aubrey
picot edge knitted by Aubrey
  1. bring the yarn forward (yfwd), which creates two stitches in the current row where there is one stitch in the previous row (increase)
  2. knit two stitches together (k2tog), which creates only one stitch in the current row where there are two stitches in the previous row (decrease).

According to the instructions, there should be two stitches left at the end, which are to be knitted (k2). However, no matter how many times I did this row, I could not get the right number of stitches at the end. I always ended up with 54 stitches, but with only one stitch to knit at the end. Eventually, I think I got it right in the first piece, but I definitely didn’t in the second piece. It irks me a little, but it doesn’t look obvious. Maybe it will once it’s sewn up; who knows?

Knitting a hem

Once I’d done the picot row and knitted a few more stst rows, I had to create a hem. This meant knitting one stitch from the cast-on edge into each stitch along the row of stitches on the needle. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be, and I finished quite quickly. The bottom edge was now not the cast-on edge, but the picot row, which changed from a row of holes to a row of bumps as a fancy edging. Nice.

Read the next instalment to see how I get on with blackberry stitch.

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