Today's fingerloop braids

Well, so far.  Maybe there will be more later today, though if so, I'll try to wait until at least tomorrow to inflict them on my imaginary audience.

This is a 7-strand braid.  My fingers really did not want to cooperate in walking down loops! Dunno if that's because it's a 7-strand A-fell braid or because of the angle I held it at or my fingers just weren't having it.

This is a pigtail-type braid.  The place I saw it described/explained was very careful to take the loops reversed in a particular direction.  Hmmm.  I tried reversing it in the other direction and not reversing it at all and it didn't seem to make any difference.  Then I figured out that this was a braid called "A Lace Broad Party" and the instructions on silkewerk.com (from a saved version on archive.org) specifically mention that it makes no difference whether or not the loops get reversed.  Hah.  Dunno if it makes a difference with bi-color loops.  Probably not, since no loops go through any other loops.

Anyway, this is apparently Tollemache 62 and thus a genuine historic braid.  No loops get pulled through any other loops.  The empty index finger picks up the pinky-finger loop from the other hand.  The loops get lowered, repeat with other hand, etc.

It's pretty much the same thing I was doing with pigtail-style braids with 5 and 3 loops.  And indeed, it can generalize to other numbers of loops, and it can also be done freehand, and can also be done by going through some loops while going under/over others.

It's a pretty cute braid, of course.  But wow, I think I need to work on finger dexterity and finger independence!

Also, although I'm still playing around with 4- and 5-loop braids, I'm ready to also start exploring more braids that have more than 5 loops.

This yellow braid is actually 2 different braids.  I changed about halfway through.  They are both 4-loop braids.

The first one is from a handout I apparently found online somewhere.  It is from Eowyn de Wever, "Fingerloop Braiding; A sampler of four braids on 8 loops and 2 colours", from a class that she taught at some point since these are referred to as class notes.

The braid I did is "The Square Braid on 4 loops." This is supposed to be a helpful transition braid between an 8-loop spiral and a barleycorn-type braid.

I did that for about half or a bit more than half of the length of the braid, then got tired of dropping loops and my fingers not wanting to move loops around.

The second half of the braid is from The Weaver's Journal 37, Summer 1985.  There's an article in there by Noemi Speiser, "Unusual Braids Produced by Loop Manipulation", p.15-18, 67-73.  A lot of it is about the joys of track plans.  Luckily she includes the basic fingerloop manipulations as a guide for how the plans correspond to the braids.  I mean, I do understand what the track plans represent.  But I'm still having trouble backing out the finger/loop movements from only the track plan.  Clearly I need to practice more and do a few exercises in working with both the track plan and the fingerloop diagrams at the same time, or taking the one and generating the other, or both.

The braid I did is the 4-loop braid from Figure 8 on p.70. It was a lot more satisfactory than the first braid, not nearly as annoying to do.  Speiser says that this braid was found on "an old European purse."

I'll have to try these again using loops of different colors.  I may also switch the pigtail braid to V-fell to see if it's less annoying that way.

It's kind of fun to see how the two yellow braids look relatively similar (as monocolor braids) even though they have different structures.  Also, the Speiser braid tends to spiral.

Each braid has 3 faces, I think.  For the Speiser braid, they are all Vs or herringbones.  For the de Wever braid, there are 2 faces of Vs/herringbones and one that looks sort of like the flat face of a 3-loop flat braid (i.e. it shows interlacements).

All of these braids were meant as samplers/experiments, which is part of why the tension is inconsistent.  Well, part of it was general new-braid and finger-dexterity awkwardness.  But I really did want to see what the 7-loop Lace Broad Party looked like at different tensions.

I'd also like to work through the rest of the braids in the Speiser article as well as doing the braid in the connected article by Adele Cahlander on p. 15-16, "Detective Story: Unraveling the Mystery of a 7-loop braid."  Which also means I need to go back through her sling-braiding books/articles to look for fingerloop braids.  The last time I really looked at them, I was more interested in the square braids that are done freehand or on a marudai.

And alas, there's nothing about fingerloop braiding in the few things I have, including her book on Sling Braiding in the Andes.  Harumph.  I don't recall anything about fingerlooping in the book referenced in the article.  The book referenced by Cahlendar was that Andean knitting book by Cynthia LeCount, and in particular, the strap on a Bolivian monedero.  As I recall, most of LeCount's book was about the amazing knitted chullos.  I'll have to see if I own that book and if so, if anything is said about the strap or about braiding in general.

Inspired by the above, I did a few more samplers.

I tried to do a 3-loop braid, going through 0 loops, taking the loops alternately above and below the uninvolved loop.  I don't know if I was messing up or what, but I kept undoing what I'd just done.  Frustrating.  Similar for going through 2 loops while taking the moving loop reversed on one side and unreversed on the other.  It's apparently difficult to count to 3 and/or keep my fingers straight as to which is the operator loop, which is the moving loop, and what happens to loop between the two.  Or it just ends up not looking very interesting.  Sigh.

So I added a fourth loop and played again.  That was more successful!

It's hard to see, but first I did a combo 3-5 square braid, using V-fell braiding, inspired by Ingrid Crickmore's mention of the 6-loop braid done as a combo 5-7 square braid.  For one hand it was like a 3-loop braid and the other hand was like a 5-loop braid.  I took both loops reversed.  Yes, success!  It is a perfectly lovely little braid with a triangular cross-section, easy to do as long as I can count to two.  Two sides have herringbone Vs and the third shows a small, neat interlacement.

Then I took the loop reversed for the first move (when my operator finger went through 1 loop on the other side) and unreversed for the second move (when my operator finger went through 2 loops on the other side).  This makes a nice little flat braid, yay!  There are 2 Vs on each side.

Then I did the opposite -- taking the loop unreversed when going through 1 loop, taking it reversed when going through 2 loops.  This does not make a flat braid.  It's similar to the first, a triangular cross section, though I think all three sides are Vs and none show an interlacement.

Finally, since there wasn't much length left, I did the 4-loop spiral braid, varying whether I reversed loops and also varying which loop went through which loop (i.e. always the right loop on the outside, reversing the left loop, versus always the upper finger loop on the outside, reversing the lower finger loop).  They're subtly different but not enormously so, as I think I already knew.

Dunno what I'll do next, but I have a lot of potential things to try.  Plus there are some tablet weaving things I want to play with.  And I'm vaguely feeling the urge to pull out the marudai.  But I'll probably keep fingerlooping for a while even if I do start something else.