In this Professional Finishing series of blog posts we have looked at sizing, that T word, and decreasing. 

In the decreasing we mentioned the amazing difference of how one stitch makes picking up stitches nice and easy.
In this blog post I shall chat about how picking up stitches can be enjoyable and how making one small difference when knitting makes a huge difference when picking up stitches.

I have made a close up video of how to pick up stitches, you can find it here. I would recommend reading this ramble from me and then you can go and have a look at the video, or maybe vice versa because there is no sound to the video.

 I have seen people pick up stitches in lots of different ways and I hope I continue to because that’s the great thing about knitting, is that we all do things differently and if that works for you, keep going. I don’t want anyone to stop doing anything they find enjoyable. If you’re loving it, it’s enjoyable, you love how it looks, just keep doing it. If you’re doing it and it’s not enjoyable or you don’t like the way it looks, then I want to help you find an easy and simple way to make picking up stitches pure joy.

Right, the tricky bit explaining how to pick up stitches with words! Let’s imagine you have a straight edge, we have a rib so it starts with knit two, then purl two. We are looking at those two knit stitches at the edge of a row, this is why in the previous blog I suggest decreasing one stitch in from the edge.
The edge stitch is always worked in pattern, we don’t slip or knit this stitch on a wrong side row, unless that is the pattern.

For example if it’s stocking stitch, we knit it on the right side and purl it on the wrong side.

We need that first/last stitch worked in pattern because it’s between these two edge stitches that we’re going to pick up our stitch, whether it’s for a neck edge or an armhole edge. 

We don’t want to go into the very edge stitch because if we did it doesn’t matter how good a knitter we are, this edge stitch is never as neat as if we go between the first and second stitch. If we pull the stitches apart gently you will see lines  – I say bars – but they’re little lines here and that’s what we’re looking for. 

They are a guide only, we’re not going to do anything with the lines, we are not going to knit these lines. I know some people interpret pick up and knit as in take something like this line and knit into it with two knitting needles. 

That isn’t how I do it, I use just one knitting needle or one side of a circular needle, We use the line as a guide and we go through the knitting from front to back and we use the knitting as the other needle as it were. This is going to be a bit tricky to explain so hopefully the close up video helps with this bit –  we have our two stitches, the first and second stitches that are like ‘v’s we use them as guides too. We want to be in the middle of these two vs.

And then you loop the yarn around the needle and make a stitch by pulling it through the knitting.

To find the next place to go into you look for the line as a guide and go over this into the hole from front to back and then make the next stitch.
If you do that and you’re knitting along all the way in the same place in the same way, you will get a nice pick up edge with the v stitches either side.

Another great thing about this technique is that you don;t have to count your stitches.

I have picked up the stitches on everything that needs it in the Skipton studio and before that I picked up the stitches on all the garments I designed as a freelance designer, one year this was 200 garments from test knitters. So while the stitch gauge may be correct the row gauge may not be. There might be a mathematical answer to this but for some reason, for all the pick ups I’ve done, with all those different row gauges, if you do a simple pick up 4 stitches then miss the 5th one, then pick up four, miss one, four, miss one, you get the perfect amount of stitches for that row gauge. A perfectly flat even picked up edge.

How to apply this to a pattern?
You don’t have to put pins in to work out how many to pick up in intervals or pick up too many or two few and then have to squeeze in the rest in a small amount of space.
If the pattern asks you to pick up 10 stitches for example and you get that amount then go fro it, but if using this technique and you get 11, or 12, then there are many solutions!
 If you are one or two stitches out, and it’s just a plain garter stitch edge, just knit it.
If it’s a repeat, so say like a rib repeat, like a two by two rib, a repeat of four, then we have to do a bit of maths and there’s different solutions to that. 

In my Professional Finishing workshop, we talk about the different solutions.
One of the solutions is if you pick up an amount of stitches and it doesn’t match your size then you look at your pattern and see if there’s another size that matches your amount because this technique means that the pick up stitches are perfect for your row gauge and that might not match he size you picked. It’s so tricky to explain here and so perhaps I’ll look at writing another blog about it, or if you’ve done this then do pop into the studio and I can help with the solution!