Picot Height for Central Beads: Small Threads

Just wanted to post a quick update that the snowflake patterns I have been working on will be available in my Etsy shop next week. In the meantime, I've been running a few more trials with picot gauges for centrally placed beads. Muskaan brought up a good point in my last blog post about thread size. All of my examples dealt with size 20 thread, but if you are working with something smaller, the calculation will be a little different. I'll go ahead and update that post to include the new information.

Here are a couple of samples I tatted in size 40 and size 80 thread:

To recap, calculating the height of the long beaded picot for centrally placed beads involves taking the combined height of the beads and then adding some extra for joins. (You can read over my last blog post for a detailed explanation about the process.) When working with size 40 or smaller thread, the extra picot height needed per spoke will be 0.9 mm. If you are using bugle beads or seed beads, you might want to increase the extra per spoke up to 1 mm. This is because the beads sit a little further apart than Swarovski crystals.

Here's the formula for size 40 or smaller thread:

Combined height of beads + (0.9 mm extra for joins * number of spokes) = picot height

You can increase 0.9 up to 1 mm if you are working with bugle or seed beads.


For size 20 thread, the formula is:

Combined height of beads + (1.3 mm extra for joins * number of spokes) = picot height

You can decrease 1.3 mm to 1.2 mm if you pull your thread tightly.


Another tip: You can use tweezers to gently pull on the bare thread between beads, to make slight adjustments as needed. This helps in a couple of situations. 1) If you are running out of picot thread to join to, and need to squeeze a little more out of it for the last bead. 2) If you have too much picot thread, and want to redistribute it more evenly between beads when the tatting is finished.

Well, that's all for now. If you try out any of these formulas, let me know how they work out for you! I'm curious to know how universally they can be applied.