Knitting Quick Tip: Picking Up Stitches on Long Edges

I’m working on a cool log cabin style blanket right now that is constructed by knitting a square in the center and then picking up stitches along the edge of one side, knitting a strip, rotating, picking up stitches, knitting a strip, rotating… etc.  I’m on the 12th panel right now so I’m at the point where I’m picking up about 100 stitches with many more to come.  I thought I’d pop on the blog to share how I evenly pick up stitches along the edge of a long piece of knitting, in case you don’t know this trick!

All you need to do is fold the piece in half and put a safety pin to mark the halfway mark, then you can fold the half-sections in half and mark the quarter-way marks and continue on until you have sections where you are ideally picking up no more than 15 stitches per section.  (Obviously you’ll do the math and divide the number of stitches you need to pick up by the number of sections you marked off so you know how many stitches to pick up per section.)

So, in the example below, I needed to pick up 99 stitches and I divided it into 8ths so I’d be picking up 12 stitches in most sections and 13 in a few.  See below:

I really like these bulb pins because I can slide them onto the needle when I get to the marker and that helps me keep count of how many stitches are in the current section.

Why take the time to section off the edge?  If you are just willy-nilly picking up 99 stitches along an edge and you aren’t picking them up at the exact right intervals, you’ll get all the way to the end and realize you’ve picked up too many or too few – then you need to rip out 99 stitches and start over trying to space them more evenly.

I recommend dividing the piece up so you pick up no more than 15 stitches per section because it’s much easier to eye-ball how you’ll pick up the stitches evenly across a section that size and if you get to the end of the section and realize you messed up your spacing, you only have to rip out 15 stitches to go back to the beginning-of-section marker.

Hope this was helpful!