Terminology

It's the po-tay-to po-tah-to of knitting. Pick up and knit versus pick up a stitch. This time I'm feeling confounded. I thought the two phrases we synonymous, at least more so than less. But Erin want me to "pick up and knit" stitches when I'm joining at the cast-on stage, but pick up and knit together when I'm joining row by row, if you know what I mean. Maybe not.

Okay. Here' what I think pick up and knit at the cast on edge looks like. I'm pretty sure this is right.

I'm stuck when it comes to joining this square to the rest of the blanket. I'm supposed to knit to the last stitch of a right side row, then pick up a stitch from the adjacent square and knit the two together. In practical terms, I thought this meant, slip the last stitch to the right hand needle. Insert the left hand needle into the slipped end stitch of the adjacent square and pull up a loop of the working yarn. Slip the stitch on the right hand needle back to the left hand needle. Knit the two together, as in knit two loops of the same yarn. That felt pretty awkward and besides it didn't actually work right. I ripped it out before I thought about taking a picture.

I decided to try something else. I knit to the end of the row. Picked up a loop of the working yarn through a stitch from the adjacent row to join. Turned the work. Knit the two together (on the wrong side). Decidedly less cumbersome, at least for the way I knit. Except I didn't like the result, again. I ended up with these horizontal squash colored bars encroaching on the variegated squares (you can see this at the bottom two rows of the square in production).

I came to the conclusion that, for this pattern, pick up a stitch is not the same as pick up and knit. Now I think maybe I need to slip the last stitch to the right hand needle. Insert the left hand needle into the last stitch of the adjacent square - without pulling the working yarn through. Slip the stitch on the right hand needle back to the left hand needle and knit one leg from the end stitch of the adjacent square with the last stitch from the square still under construction. This is, I'm pretty sure, what the pattern requires, especially considering that the next (wrong-side) row begins with slipping the first stitch. Only I don't like the way it looks, either (that would be the top two rows of the square in production).

I've frogged back to the cast on, and I've got one last trick I want to try. Jane's Booties use a similar technique to join the instep to the sides, admittedly while knitting in the round.

I've threaded a smaller dpn through the loops I need to join and want to see if I pick the stitches this way if I can improve the the finished product. We'll see what things look like once I finish a square. Maybe (she said with a desperately hopeful note in her voice) it will look better then?

You say pomme de terre and I say po-tay-to.