Yeah, more photos that all kind of look alike, too indistinct to make out details, and full of extraneous/confusing spots, such as when a loop got dropped and put back on the finger backwards, or a short experimental section that went very wrong, or inconsistent tension because I didn't care and didn't have a good anchor point, or a cat tried to help at various points.
And yet, informative for me, which is why I'm writing this down as a way to remember what I did and why.
Yeah, I know these are a trifle hard to see. These are from Jean Leader's fingerloop braid seminar done for the Braids and Band groups.io mailing list in 2021. In particular, these are from Part 3: Some More Braids.
On the handout, she has a couple of braids that are classified as "5-loop braids with some loops missed." She shows one where the loops are taken with no turns, and then one where the loops are taken reversed (i.e. with turns). She has various color patterns as examples, and I chose the variation with 5 bi-color loops, with color A on top and color B on bottom for all 5 loops.
These are all done in the A-fell method, by the way. Loops are on abc on one hand and bc on the other. The operator finger a goes through the loop on b (on the same hand), skips over the top of loop c (on the same hand) and then picks up the loop on c of the other hand. Walk down the loops and repeat.
So... The first braid is taken with loops unturned. The front and back are similar - each looks like a single column of knit stitches (or a V or a herringbone, I guess), with color A on one side and color B on the other. Now that I've finished the braid and looked at it more closely, I guess there's a bit of a ditch on the color A side (the color that was the top color of the loops) but it's not hugely obvious. The overall braid shape is oblong, slightly parallelogram-shaped or trapezoid-shaped in the cross-section with the edge thread of the bottom showing slightly along one side of the top.
For grins, I then did 5 moves with crossed loops, and then resumed the uncrossed loops. This was kind of fun -- as planned, color A was now on top and color B on the bottom, with the subtle ditch on the B side.
Then I switched to doing the all-crossed loop braid, where the loop is always taken reversed. This means that color A and B switch sides as they circle around the fingers on both hands. This also looks like the classic Broad Lace of 5 bows, with the ditch on the bottom now opened up more to show the flat interlacement of the loops, with the top looking like 2 Vs and being rather convex/curved. The center V of the top is higher than the 2 threads on each side, if that makes sense. It really does look like the ditch/groove on the bottom just opens up and flattens out the braid overall, making it shorter and wider.
Then I did the thing where I took the loop reversed with one hand and un-reversed with the other. It looks pretty similar to the first braid but with the bottom a little more opened up so the ditch is more visible. It does not become a flat braid the way the the square braid does.
OK, now it's time for V-fell, though I did a little bit of braiding while not going through any loops besides the moving loop to make sure I wasn't going to unbraid everything the way that Ingrid Crickmore warns us about. I did a bit by taking the other-hand loop c above the loops, and some by taking it under. I'd like to re-do this because it looks like one of them (the taking-the-loop-under) has an interesting interlacement pattern on top with a herringbone on the bottom, and it appears slightly fatter than the one done by going over the top. Dunno...
I switched to V-fell, with a few fumbles until my fingers caught the pattern again.
Loops were on fingers abc on one side and ab on the other. The empty c finger went through the other c, skipped b, and picked up a. I think. Argh, maybe I skipped c and went through b! If so, the following maybe not be applicable!
I did the same thing as before -- loops unreversed, loops reversed, one hand reversed and the other unreversed.
Ingrid Crickmore's triangle braid is one of these, the one with loops reversed. It does look slightly different from the other braids. Not significantly so, but somewhat if one really takes a look at it vs the A-fell equivalent. (though I must remember that I might not have skipped over the same loop for the A-fell and V-fell braids)
Conclusions -- these are all cute braids and easy to do. For all of them, the bottom is wider than the top. They are all pretty easy to do. They're all relatively similar-looking at first glance, with the difference being how obvious the groove in the bottom is and how much it spreads out. It's interesting that there's not a ton of difference in how the braid looks, at first glance and not counting the color pattern, whether both hands to the same moves or if each hand does something different (reversed vs un-reversed).
With the unreversed-turn braids, I like the idea of being able to switch colors more or less at will by doing 5 moves with crossed loops to flip the colors.
I would like to repeat this experiment by changing out whether the loop closest to the moving loop gets gone through or gone over. (in other words, for v-fell, do I go through c, over b, and pick up a, or do I go over c, through b, and pick up a). I'll probably do it with 5 different single-color loops instead of bi-color loops. Or maybe 10 different colors if I'm feeling very ambitious, to really see the path of each thread.
But on the whole, this was an enlightening set of experiments on the difference various factors make in a 5-loop braid where some loops are missed.
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