Today was the obverse of yesterday’s carefree and errand-less day.

By ten o’clock this morning when my youngest son and I had left the house, I had spent the better part of the previous two hours working on household chores. As for the assorted errands, they lasted just over six hours.

In between the hither and yon of our travels, we made a variety of stops, including one for my son’s weekly trumpet lesson. And just as I did two weeks earlier, I used my son’s trumpet lesson as an opportunity to thumb through the copy of volume 2 of Greystone’s Crafting Hands series that rests on a shelf in the corner where trumpet moms (of which I am one) sit.

The last time I had looked at the book, I had busied myself with a pattern called “Wagon Wheel.” Composed of a larger circle (five rounds in size) and a smaller circle (two rounds in size) it was a delightful and well considered pattern, but today, my head was turned by the section titled “Crochet know-how 10: Trimmings and borders galore.”

The Crochet Liberation Front, recognizing the importance of the picot in crochet, has a tag-line on the homepage of their website proclaiming “Setting picot free since 2007!”

I have been slow to explore this crochet technique in my own crochet work, but today, while waiting at my son’s trumpet lesson, I had the opportunity to begin to remedy this deficit in my crochet education.

I put my first effort toward making the edging described on page 188 as “a small picot edging.”

With a 4.5 mm hook and some Red Heart Super Saver tea leaf yarn, I followed the directions and was very pleased with the result:

Encouraged by the relative ease with which I was able to create the small picot edging, I switched yarn colors from seagrass to delft, and set out to make the “lace picot.”

In my first effort, I worked the stitch through the back loop of the chain stitch. The result was a series of lace picots of which no two went in the same direction.

While I loved the look, I wanted to make something that could more easily lay flat.

For my second effort, I worked the stitch through the front loop only, and I got a much more (although not entirely) obedient strand that could be tacked on to the bottom of a pair of jeans, the end of a sleeve, a neckline:

I am absolutely delighted with the picot stitches and I will definitely be looking at how to incorporate them into more of my work.

I am equally delighted with the Greystone Crafting Hand series, and will be looking to get my own crafting hands on a complete set of them.

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