More Fingerloop Braiding for the first week of March (5 loop and 7 loop braids)

I'm quickly running out of good post titles that aren't exactly the same as all the others.  I have that problem with tablet weaving, too.  And everything else, I suppose.

These have been done in the past few days, interspersed with other things, of course.

This first braid is made from some kind of perle weaving cotton, probably #10-ish.  I bought the cotton a zillion years ago, when I was looking for fine threads suitable for doily knitting.  It was during a time when good cotton thread in finer sizes was becoming very scarce in local stores, especially in colors.  The cotton was way too soft and uneven to work well with doilies, so it's been slowly getting used up in other projects.  I am pretty sure I'll be using some of this for tablet-weaving, too, assuming it's not too soft to take the tension and potential abrasion.

The pattern is a basic 5-loop square braid using bi-color loops.  Color A is on top for the left hand, Color B is on top for the right hand.  I'm pretty sure I did this as a V-fell loop.

This seems to be what the old fingerloop-braiding manuscripts call a "lace baston" -- according to the Silkewerk site, this is Tollemache 6 (a lace bastonne), Harleian 5 (a lace baston), and Serene 6 (a lace bastuve of 5 bows).  The fingerloop.org site claims it's #4 in Harley 2320, and #18 in "To Make Pursestrings" as documented in the book Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd by Janet Arnold.  Also, this is a braid that Ingrid Crickmore shows on her site as one of the color variations for 5-loop square braids.

Clearly different people refer to things from the old manuscripts in different ways, but I don't care all that much about the historic provenance.  It's a completely obvious color variation once for 5-loop square braids.

The braids are tiny!  The cotton really packs down tightly compared to the big-box-store crochet cottons, though the latter are somewhat thicker and more tightly plied, to be fair.

Also, I am still pretty terrible at recovering after a mistake.  Each braid has one spot where things went off the rails and I had to try to recover.  Sigh.  As I experienced with tablet-weaving, I expect it'll take me a while to understand how to fix my mistakes and then also get the loops back on my fingers in the correct order.

This braid really does show mistakes since the patterns is vertical stripes.  Our eyes REALLY notice anything that breaks the lines.

This one would be fun for switching around the loops (by doing a round of non-reversed loops or giving the loops another twist, to reverse which color is on top) and going back and forth in little checks or broken stripes.

The braids are pretty cute, though, in spite of the mistake in each one.  I've been doing pairs of them to use as drawstrings and ties.

This second braid is another sampler/experimental braid.  Since it's dark green and since I'm a terrible photographer, it's hard to see the details.  I'm writing down what I did and what I think about it so I don't forget!

All of these were done V-fell, where the ring finger is the operator finger and it usually picks up the index finger loop from the other hand.

The first part is a braid I've done before -- the ring finger picks up the index-finger loop from the other hand, and I picked up the loop reversed even though it doesn't really matter.

I believe this to be the 5-loop version of the "lace broad party" I did a few days ago.  It looks perfectly reasonable and is a nice, tight braid that looks like a pigtail.  It isn't as extravagantly indented as the 7-loop version.

The second part is an unorthdox braid, as Noemi Speiser would have it.  My ring-finger is the operator loop.  It skips the ring finger of the other hand, goes through the middle-finger loop, and picks up the index-finger (reversed).  This turns out fairly flat, a V or herringbone on the back, a flat interlacement on the front.  I'm pretty sure this is the classic, everyone-does-it, 5-loop fingerloop braid.

I then did something slightly different, picking up the index-finger loop after going through the ring-finger loop and skipping over the middle finger loop, again with a reversed loop.  It looks different from the above, rather triangular.  The bottom is a V.  The top looks like a small V sitting on top, sort of a wedge-shaped triangle.  I think this might be the same as one of the triangle or D-shaped braids in Ingrid Crickmore's website?

(And ugh, I might already not remember in which order I did these.)

I then repeated the two braids to make sure I was really seeing a difference.  Yup.  For funsies, I didn't reverse the traveling loop.  The braids are pretty much the same, maybe a trifle fluffier and looser, with the top side sitting higher above the bottom side.

Then I finished up with an inch or two of the basic square braid.

I am not 100% certain if I have sections 2/4 and 3/5 correct.  Goldfish brain...  But it does show that it makes a difference which loops get skipped vs gone through.  Dunno if there's a difference if I had gone under rather than over the loop.

It makes a minor difference whether the loop is taken reversed or open.  So that seems to be characteristic of a braid where some or all loops are skipped rather than gone through.  Which I knew, but it's always nice to double-check.  It'll make it easier to switch colors (by taking loops reversed instead of unreversed or vice versa) really unobtrusively, too.

Here are Ingrid Crickmore's thoughts on Unorthodox Braids, which seem to be concepts I was playing around with in this braid (though I didn't read her thoughts until after I'd done this braid.)  Hmm, she says it makes no difference whether one consistently goes under or over loops, but it does make a little bit of difference which way one twists the loops that get reversed.  Very cool.

This third pic is the 7-loop Celtic Braid again.  I might want to teach this braid in a few weeks, so I need to practice!  This is still slentre style; I haven't tried a V-fell or A-fell version yet.  I think I usually took the loop crossed, though some of it might have been with open loops.  Given that no loops go through each other, crossed vs uncrossed shouldn't really make much difference.

I did try some different things with this braid, not just the basic Celtic Braid.  I started and ended with the version I did before, where the operator finger goes over-under-over-through.  Then I tried over-over-under-through.  I like that version, too.  It's very neat-looking on both sides. Whereas the first version is almost identical on both sides and is flat and wide, the second is narrower and thicker and not quite identical.  One side looks like interlacements and the other more like a herringbone (somewhere between Vs and interlacements).

Then I tried under-over-under-through and under-under-over-through and various other things and didn't like them.  So I finished up with a little bit more of the original.

My fingers are slowly improving at loop-walking.  More practice is needed!  I might try this one in a thicker twine or hemp or something to see if it would make a useful braided belt.

This fourth loop is another mish-mash of 7-loop braids.  What the heck, it's time to try the 7-loop square braid.  It went swimmingly, yay!  Then a bit of flat braiding (loop reversed on one hand, unreversed on the other), more square, then flat braiding but taking the unreversed loop from the other hand, and finishing up with a really short section of split braids.

I did this as a V-fell braid, not that it matters much.  My fingers were not too bad at walking the loops up, whew.  I didn't even need to look up what to do -- just extrapolated the pattern from the 3 and 5 loop braids.  The little finger is the operator finger, and it goes through the loops on the pinky, ring, and middle fingers of the other hand before picking up the index finger traveling loop.

I did need to open up the flat braids; they wanted to stay folded up.  The side on which the flat braid opened did indeed depend on which had took reversed vs unreversed loops.

The two split braids look like pigtail braids, not like little 7-strand braids.  That's slightly disappointing.  The square braid is very square-looking, nice.

What's next?  I'm not sure, as usual.  More braids, I guess!  I'll trawl the usual sources for ideas and things to try.

I should do more sets of braids to use as drawstrings and lacing and start experimenting more with color patterns.  I should do a little write-up if I end up teaching the Celtic Braid.  I also might crank out a few tablet-weaving bands for gifts.