Long picots in tatting can be a great way of enhancing your work or creating special effects. Usually they will be measured with a gauge which you can make from a piece of card or plastic - some years back I created two sets of gauges, one in millimetres and one in inches - using template plastic and a ruler, they have been perfectly accurate and although the thread tying them together broke some months back and had to be fixed the gauges themselves are perfectly good. You can of course buy sets of pre-made gauges but the range of widths may be limited. The advantage of making them yourself is (a) that it's far cheaper and (b) you always have the size you want to hand - and it's easy to make another if you need a different width.
If you're doing pictorial work you may find you don't need to measure your long picots that carefully, just make them as long as you think they need to be and leave them loose or lay them in a particular direction and either stitch or glue the picot in place depending on how you are mounting your picture.
There are many different ways of dealing with long picots to create special effects within the lace and I won't be able to cover them all in one article.
One of the easiest ways of handling them is to make a group of longer picots, then join to the group bunching them together to gather them. This can be the standard join or you can make the bunch very long, then when you have made the next double stitch after the bunch of long picots join into them so that they fold over. You can then continue working as normal - this is a great effect for flowers and Helma Siepmann illustrates it beautifully on her site here.
Long picots can be woven in several different ways. A wonderful pattern for a bookmark using picots woven over and under one another is shown in The Ring of Tatters magazine for Autumn 2003. You can create a line of long picots on a chain (with the picots thread wound on a second shuttle), then work round with the chain facing back towards the picots and create a second line of fake long picots by making lock joins with the second shuttle into the tip of the first line of picots. This is great for creating leaves and flowers. The book New Designs in Tatting contains a range of advanced patterns using this technique.
Long picots can also be pulled through one another, either loosely or pulled straight. They can be twisted to form long, straight lines and beads can be placed on them, either in a long line right round the picot or when you join to the picot thread beads onto it before you join. You can cross them over or under one another and you can weave over them to create the Wide Picot (click on the Misc text link in the bottom bar of the frameset on this page, then scroll down at the left hand side till you see the Wide Picot link).
Finally another great technique with long picots - create a very long picot, work a few double stitches, then fold it over and join into it. Mary Maynard's book Tatted Rings of Flowers illustrates many lovely variations of this one and you can play with it to create all sorts of pretty effects.
