How do you determine what size to make your picots when the pattern refers to them as small, medium or larger? Perhaps you are making a pattern that the designer used size 10 thread and you are doing it in a size 80 thread. The designer says to make a ˝” picot, you know that won’t look right to make that size with finer thread what do you do how do you decide?

What I like to do is compare my picot size to the stitches by doing this my smalls always are the same ratio to my tatting no matter what size my thread is and I don’t have to worry if the pattern is done in a size 10 or 80 the look will flow right. I go by the ‘waist band’ area of the stitch, a construction picot (one not needed for decoration) would be about one and half stitches when picot is open, a small would be equal to three stitches when the picot is open and so on. I wish designers would refer to picot sizes this way.

So how do you do it?