Picking up garter stitches along an edge

HI'm working on a project from "Shawls and Scarves - the Best of Knitter's Magazine".  I own this remarkable book.  You can see the Ravelry project page for the project I'm working on: A Blue Wrap.  It is designed by Linda Cyr.  The modular construction is something new for me.  The rectangular wrap is based on squares shaped by smaller garter stitch squares that build around each other, sort of Log Cabin style. 

I was dreading picking up the garter stitches along the sides, but did my due diligence on U-Tube.  And I found that you can pick up the edge stitches (the ridges will be vertical) with a dpn and work off of that.  The trick is to use a much smaller dpn that your project needle, and the dpn will just slide right through those end stitches (I picked up the right hand ridge stitch).

The picture cheats a little, as the right hand needle will actually be mostly empty.  In this project, you bind off and work down the side, picking up all the edge stitches in one fell swoop.

kere's a pic below that shows what the junction looks like.  I don't thing it would work out so seamlessly, except that this Muse yarn by Stacy Charles is nubby and sinuous.  It's a cotton/rayon/nylon DK blend of pure drape and was the perfect choice for this wrap.  (I was fooling around this week and tried picking up stitches this way with a worsted weight acrylic - and it did not look as nice...)

I'm going to be doing some mods to the pattern, to make it more like a very shallow triangular shawl.  If you want to see how it turns out, come visit my Ravelry project page.