Charlene has been studying the twisted picot as taught in Elgiva Nicholls' "Tatting Techniques." Elgiva gives the directions for these twisted picots in a shamrock as a exercise to teach how to twist the picots without splitting the threads.

You insert the crochet hook fully into the long picot and then rotate the entire hook either clockwise or counterclockwise (choose one and stick with it for the entire pattern) until the slack is gone. Next pull thru the thread and complete the join. It helps to keep the picot fully extended while rotating.

The pattern is a ring of 8 DS with the picots alternating between short and long and separated by 1 DS. As written. Elgiva advises us to RW and pull thread to back and join to the picot on the left and chain around using shuttle joins to the small picots.

However, you can instead climb out of the tiny ring thru a mock picot and simply commence the chain from there. Use the magic thread trick on the stem for a smooth no tail finish.