Fingerloop braiding in public

Yesterday I did another little fingerlooping class.  This was a freeform drop-in thing.

I taught some braids, yay!  The ones in the photo are a 4-loop Makusua braid, done as a Z-spiral.  The other is a medley of A-fell 5-loop braids (unorthodox, split, round/square, flat, and pigtail/plait).

The people I taught had not done much fingerloop braiding, though one said it reminded her of something she did in elementary school, so maybe she had learned how to fingerloop braid when she was younger.

The braid they found easiest was the last one -- the 5-loop pigtail/plait, where the loops do not go through each other.  Basic directions -- put 3 loops on one hand, fingers abc, and 2 loops on the other, fingers bc.  The a finger (aka index finger) picks up the c finger (aka ring finger) on the other hand.  Walk loops and repeat.  Generalize to other numbers of strands as desired, and ditto for using the littler finger as the traveling finger rather than the bigger finger.

So, hmm, in the future, if/when I teach new braiders, maybe I should start them off with plaiting.  Or don't be too ambitious, and just teach one braid instead of a bunch!  I do get carried away with enthusiasm and wanting to show people cool stuff.  But with plaiting, people can get used to moving loops around and transferring them from finger to finger.  Then one can add the idea of pulling one loop through another loop, then pulling one loop through two or more other loops, and after that, reversed vs unreversed taking of the loops.

The event had various things going on.  I saw some lovely tablet-weaving, some spinning, some knitting and crocheting, lucet-ing, inkle weaving, sewing/embroidering, nalbinding, a bit of macrame, and so on.  I'm not sure if anyone was braiding besides me, though I did see some finished braids (done by several different methods) and also a marudai (though it was was bare, no braid on it).

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Currently I'm finishing up a knitted doily so I haven't set up a new band yet.  But I'm thinking about it.  So many possibilities!  The things that appeal today are tablet-woven cords, two-hole, 3/1 twill, and "something new" whether it's double-cloth or brocade or pebble weave or some other technique I've not yet officially explored.  But my ideas change often so who knows what I'll actually do?

It's kind of amazing to look back and see the techniques I've played with in the past several years.  For many, I've only done a little taste, but at least I've tried and experienced some of what's involved.  I hope I get to continue my tablet-weaving self-education for a good long time.

And ditto for braiding, of course!

Two-hole diamond pattern booped to completion

 Well, except for the blocking, but that'll happen soon.

It ended up long enough, whew.  I warped about 11' and ended up with close to 9'.  Well, 106" (before blocking), but if I'd needed to and was willing to deal with the aggravation, I probably could have gotten another couple of inches woven.  It's about 3/8" wide (11mm or so), which also fits in with the request for a narrow band.

It was a reasonably fun and relaxing project once I settled into the booping-along phase and I like how it turned out.  I hope my friend likes it, too.

Now I get to dither about what to make next.

Two hole X and O tablet woven band progress

I wrote about this in my last post -- a long tablet-woven band for a friend, in a 2-hole X and O pattern that is based on something found in Siksala and is also a common motif from Antinoe and wherever else 2-hole tablet-weaving is done.

I started with a pic from one of Aisling's instagram posts.  It showed a striking 2-hole pattern of red and blue Xs, with the O's subordinate to the Xs.  I liked that a lot.  As far as I can tell, the etsy pattern she based her band on had only two colors.  That's also true of the Antinoe/Coptic band patterns in Aisling's book (and the museum samples her book re-creates).  It was quite simple to chart out the pattern just based on the photo.

My friend showed me a pic of the fabrics the band will go on and requested colors to match -- turquoise, purple, and taupe (well, a medium beige-y brownish-grayish color).  So I warped up.  Purple for the middle X, aqua for the outer two Xs, taupe for the background, taupe and purple for the edge tablets, and purple for the weft.

Here is where I will digress to talk about warping.  Ugh, I still have so much to learn.  I ended up using a warping board since I didn't have conveniently-placed areas to set up C-clamps and using my inkle loom wouldn't be long enough.  I wasn't able to keep the yarn balls untangled so continuous warping wasn't working well.  I don't have a set-up to keep the balls from bouncing around yet, and that seems to be key for successful continuous warping.  It wasn't too bad to do a few tablets at a time, in hopes that will reduce the tangling.  Mostly I'm trying to keep the unwoven warp ends from tangling too badly, since this is a long warp and the ends can be a pain to keep straight.  Oh, well.   Also, the floor had more cat fluff on it than I realized until I found myself removing little cat fur pills from everything.  That will haunt me for the entire warp, alas.  And it won't be helped by the cat's continuing assistance, such as sitting on the warp and shedding, playing with and sitting on the unwoven warp ends, etc.

Someday I'll get warping streamlined.  It's not so much cutting a bunch of threads and warping.  It's more about keeping things under control so they don't tangle so badly.  Even continuous warping offers great scope for tangling what with the tablets bouncing around and needing to rotate or flip tablets to get them in the correct orientation for the pattern.

Anyway, off I go.  It's really fun, as two-hole always is.  Bright little Xs, etc.  But then I looked at the backside.  Ooh, I like that better!  Bright little diamonds in two colors, surrounded by the neutral/taupe background!

Hmm, should I alternate areas of colorful Xs and then colorful Os?  I thought about it for a little while, then decided I didn't want to keep track of how many repeats before switching.  This will be a long band with simple weaving, and I'd rather zone out and enjoy the rhythm.

So I unwove back to the beginning.  The purple weft was pilling a bit and picking up cat fur, and there probably wouldn't have been enough for the full band.  Hmm, maybe I should change that, too.  I found a bit of taupe-ish thread in the doily leftovers stash that looked reasonable as a substitute.  That's what I'm now using.  It's almost certainly DMC Cebelia #10.  I do like the little colored blips at the edge of the band that I get when using a weft color that contrasts with the edge warp color.  It's ornamental.  I also like hiding the blips by matching the color to the edges, which had been my original plan.  The band will look good either way.

I am booping along happily now.  Yes, changing out the weft and slightly altering the turn sequence was the right choice, at least for my own aesthetics.

 

The above pic is near the beginning so I'm still futzing around a bit with how tight to pull the weft and all that.

It amuses me that at first glance the band is so different from the pic that inspired me.  I mean, it's really the same, just two steps from the inspiration, which was itself two steps from its own inspiration, and that too was an interpretation of the original artifact.

Hmm, the band might be cuter with 4 more pattern tablets in purple/taupe to add another set of purple diamonds.  But no, I think I'm good now. Time to crank out pattern repeats!

I'm already dreaming about what I might want to tablet-weave next.  More two-hole?  That's always an option!  Or maybe I should make sure I understand Icelandic double-weave or do more Sulawesi.  Broken 3/1 twill is also calling to me.  Or maybe more cords or some double-face.  So many options, and they all make me happy.

I still need to do some experiments to see if I can reduce elongation in my tablet-weaving.  Some of it relaxes out when I soak/wash/iron the band after it's done but nowhere near all.  I've seen at least one person say that it's typical for cotton.  Dunno if that's true.  I should try some wool to see.  Also, maybe backstrap might help?  I certainly do pack the weft down pretty tightly (I can tell by the difficulty I sometimes have in unweaving), my weft is not pulled too tightly, and the elongation appears to be relatively independent of weft thickness (though thicker wefts might help -- I'll have to experiment).  It also appears to be relatively independent of weight/tension, at least for the set-up I have.  For two-hole, I could also try the thing where the edge tablets (the 4-threaded tablets) only turn every other row rather than every row.  It's also possible that I like the more relaxed feel of my bands, and that I would not like the stiffness of a band that was way more tightly woven even if the motifs were forced into squareness.

Plans and reminders

I taught some fingerloop braiding last weekend, and as a result of that, will be doing it again at a different venue in a few weeks.  It'll be a mix of fingerloop braiding and the 7-strand Fill the Gap disk braid.  Hmm, what braids do I want to have available to teach?  I'll want to have a few things in mind that will be suitable for the skill levels and experience of the people I'll be working with.  Heck, maybe some of them will be able to show me new things, too.

The teaching I did last weekend (and will be doing at the end of the month) was informal, a kind of choose-your-own-adventure, drop-in, make-and-take, demo kind of thing.  I was braiding more of the little chevron 5-loop D-shaped fingerloop braids (https://loopbraider.com/2017/08/30/uo5-11-triangle-patt/, the single-color variation of the bicolor chevrons) and people wandered over to join me.  The friend with whom I was doing those 6-loop unorthodox Sion braids came over, too.  So... we showed someone how to braid those.

Someone else had never braided before, so I started them off with a basic 3-loop orthodox fingerloop braid, done V-fell, with its three common variations (split/doubled, square, and flat).  After that, I showed them the 4-loop braid that is the same as the Skjoldehamn hood ties, from the class I taught about a month ago, using the method of the Wayuu people.  The person I showed said it looked a lot like the braids used on Karaite prayer shawls.  And wow, it actually is the same braid (though I think Karaites typically use freehand braiding techniques rather than fingerloop braiding).  So that was kind of cool.  As far as I know, other strains of Judaism use different cord structures for the fringes/braids/knots.  Plus there's a cool discussion to be found about what blue dye is or was originally used and what is now permissible -- indigo (woad or another indigo), murex purple, something else entirely, etc.

I'm pretty sure I demonstrated/taught a few more braids but I can't remember who or what.  And I forgot to take pics of the braids I made before giving them away.

I'll probably do the same kind of drop-in braiding thing rather than a formal class for the next go-round.  The disk braiding will also be pretty straightforward.  A friend gave me some foam disks to share, so I'll have those available.  I need to make more cardboard disks to hand out since I'm low on those.  My friend also gave me some foam disks with more than 8 slots, should I someday want to teach some of the other braids that can be done on a disk.  I probably won't do that this time.

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The other thing I'm doing that is narrow-wares-related is planning my next tablet-woven band, yay.  It'll be for a friend, who has asked for something longer than I usually do.  So I'll have to rig up something to measure out the warp, and hopefully keep it under control as I get going.  I expect that the cats will be their usual non-helpful weaving assistants.

I think I'll be doing a two-hole band that is very similar to the Antinoe E28288 band I did (and loved making) last year.  It's actually one of the Siksälä bands, one of the remaining fragments of Matus CC : 14.  And to claim that's my inspiration is a bit of a lie -- I saw a pic on Aisling's instagram page and thought it would work well for my purposes.  She said that she got the pattern on etsy and that it's a Siksälä pattern.  I looked at Aisling's pic and charted it out myself and then tracked down the historical reference to double-check my charting.

This is from the Siksälä II pdf publication, p. 203 --  Siksälä Kalme II Matuste ja leidude kataloog, by Heiki Valk, Jaana Ratas, and Silvia Laul, 2014.  There's all kinds of cool stuff in the pdf that is of interest to the narrow minded.

The colors of the original may or may not be discernible, and may or may not match the colors in Aisling's version, but I'm choosing colors to match my friend's preference so it doesn't matter.  My color arrangement is very much influenced by Aisling's.

These little 2-hole X-O patterns are pretty common -- various versions of this motif are also in Eva Sandermann Olsen's section on Latvian-style 2-hole tablet weaving, and in the Celaines book, and in general, are pretty easy to come up with just by fiddling around.  I'm not even sure which etsy pattern Aisling is referring to, though I think it might be the yellow and green one offered by Hrafna Norse Crafts.

(The above pic is the example from Olsen's wonderful free Tablet Weaving pdf.)

Anyway, I love two-hole patterns, I think this will look good in my friend's chosen colors and for the intended application, and it is a straightforward pattern that won't require excessive concentration to weave.

I also want to do a few more 2-hole brick-type patterns.  There are some colorful ones in the Celaines book that appeal to me in addition to various Karisto/Pasanen and general social media (as in, I don't remember their names) 2-hole patterns.  I saw someone else last weekend who was making tablet-woven cords (from one of the patterns in Tablet Woven Treasures) and now I too want to make more tablet-woven cords.  And everything else -- there are so many fun things I want to make, and not enough time/energy to do it all at once.  I like to savor what I'm doing and that means it takes a while to get to everything I want to do.  There are things I may never get to, alas.  But I am enjoying both the process and the finished creations, and I always have a long list of things I'd like to make and do.

Hopefully I'll have some more interesting pics next time I post.  Mostly I wanted to get my thoughts and ideas down, to help me plan and also to help me remember.

This Year's Final February Fingerloop Braid Post

At least I think it's the final fingerloop braid post of February 2025.

Ingrid Crickmore says that this pattern looks very striking as a square braid.  She's correct!  Find it here: https://loopbraider.com/2015/10/18/flat-6/.  It's braid "6FL-5. Piole + W".

I used my usual Aunt Lydia's #10 crochet cotton on this one, to make a finer braid than the braid made from rug warp.  I followed Crickmore's colors and patterns.  La and Lb had dark red loops and Lc had a black loop.  Ra and Rb had white loops and Rc had a black loop.

I did this as a V-fell braid and started braiding with my right hand.  The braiding sequence is: little finger on the right hand goes through all the loops on the left hand and picks up the left index finger loop by hooking over the top (reversing it).  Walk the left hand loops.  Left ring finger goes through all the loops on the right hand and picks up the right index finger loop by hooking over the top (reversing it).  Walk the right hand loops.  And repeat.

It reminds me of a king snake, with the black between the red and the white.  The colors don't show up amazingly well in my photo.  It's really very nice and dramatic and colorful.

I made two braids with this pattern, to give as a gift.  I didn't measure the braids but they're the usual 14-20" long or so.  I tried to arrange the braids so that both sides can be seen in my pic.  That is one small critique of Crickmore's site -- she usually (but not always) only shows the top side of the braid, i.e., whichever side has the coolest looking color pattern.

The finer the thread, the longer it takes to make the braid.  Of course.  I only dropped one loop per braid, and each time it was very easy to pick up and continue braiding without an obvious blip in the braid.

I'm not sure which braids I'll do next.  I do like these cute color-patterned braids.  But it's also fun to learn new braiding structures and techniques, and to continue practicing the braids that I don't do that smoothly yet.

Tablet-Woven 3-Hole Sampler Band

It is finished.

I ended up doing all of the 12-tablet charts in the 3-hole chapter of Tablets at Work.  The photos show the entire length of the band, with a lot of overlap from photo to photo to make sure I didn't miss anything.  I'm not showing the backside because it's kind of irrelevant, even though parts of it actually look kind of cool.

As you can see, I used 2 strands of white and 1 strand of teal per tablet.  There are 12 pattern tablets (3-threaded) and 2 edge tablets (4-threaded) per side, for 16 tablets total.  All the pattern tablets had a / tablet orientation (S-threaded) except for the edge cards, which were / \.  The weft was the same color and thickness as the white background threads of the warp.

The chapter (and my band) started out with a bit of the basic background pattern, which is pretty similar to the Sulawesi background pattern (in its 3-hole variation).

Then there were a few diagonals-type patterns that showed the interest added by the line of missing holes.

Then Wollny goes into what she calls "waffling", which is when the hole orientation of the tablet is turned back and forth to keep the hole on top of the band (the reverse side shows a float).  It ends up looking like those parts of the band are woven cloth rather than tablet-woven.  She also goes through the floats that can be added by waffling the pattern color and then each of the background colors.

Then she shows a tacking stitch, which is when two adjacent tablets either turn slightly forward or slightly backwards to bring up the pattern color for just that one throw of the weft.  She shows this as turning the tablets 1/8 turn.  I found that awkward.  So, for one tacking stitch set, I can use my fingers to manipulate the threads on the two tablets, one up and one down or vice versa.  Or, because that becomes annoying with more than one of these, I can do an extra quarter-turn of each of the cards, through the weft, and then return the cards to their former orientation before the next pattern row.  This is pretty similar to the Finnish half-turns that are in some of the Finnish diagonals-type patterns.

The next two motifs have two more fill patterns -- one is the background pattern that we started with, and the other is also a double-face type pattern but with the pattern thread and one of the background threads showing instead of only the background threads.

And that finished the charts shown in the teaching/demonstration part of the chapter.  (Yes, I read the text, too.)  On to Wollny's pattern charts!

I didn't know how much room I'd have, but it turned out that I was able to do every single 12-tablet pattern in the chapter.  I used a few transitional rows between some of the charts, and I had room for one variation of my own devising (only a little bit different from one of Wollny's charts).

For charts that showed pattern repeat blocks, I tried to make sure that at least two pattern repeats were part of my sampler.  For one long chart, I divided it in half, doing the first part, then another pattern, then the second part.  I didn't do a second repeat of that chart, though.

My edition (the first) has an error in the chart on the upper right of p.508.  It looked really strange when I got to it, so I looked it up.  Yup, mistake.

In no particular order, I did charts from the following pages of the 3-hole chapter (which has a dark blue heading and is on p.476-523 of Tablets at Work by Claudia Wollny):

482 (all 3 charts), 485 (charts B and C; A is boring), 488 (all 3 charts), p.490 (A; the other two are not suitable for this band since I didn't want to add brocade), p.498 (the charts that are not repeats of other charts), 506 (tablet set-up and background repeat), 508 (upper and lower right; watch for the error in the upper chart rows 5-6), 509 (upper, middle, and lower left), 510 (upper and lower right), 511 (upper and lower left), 512 (right; I did the first part, did another motif, then the second part), 519 (upper left, upper middle, and upper right), 521 (upper left, upper middle, upper right).

And that's all of the 12-tablet charts I saw in the chapter.  There's one more at the beginning of the chapter but it's roughly the same as one of the other early ones I did.

It's not a particularly difficult technique, but as with anything else requiring a lot of individual tablet manipulation, can be a bit fiddly.  I did a certain amount of unweaving...

My conclusions and thoughts and what-not:

My favorite patterns and tablet manipulations are the very textural ones -- waffling holes plus or minus floats of the threads.  These are what I had thought of as the Icelandic Missed Hole technique.

The ones that are more like traditional diagonals patterns are nice enough, with the little line of holes adding some textural interest.

A lot of the patterns use ideas about modern diagonals -- tablets moving in sets of two, two tablets and two rows at a time.

Three hole feels very different from two hole, though some of that might be because I like weaving the Latvian two hole designs and these three hole designs feel like they are coming from a different designing/weaving tradition.

This technique has some similarities with Sulawesi as well as, of course, diagonals.  And float patterns.  And double-face.  Heck, the more tablet weaving I do, the more connected everything feels to everything else.  All of the techniques are variations of other techniques.  Or so it sometimes feels like.

Wollny gave a very simple/universal/general tablet setup, suitable for anything.  Depending on the design, it might make more sense to have the tablets in a long V formation (the tablets on the left half of the pattern set in one orientation, either / or \, and the other half set the other way) for symmetric designs.  Or set them Sulawesi style, with two tablets set / alternating with two tablets set \.  Or maybe this way ends up working best for bands that will have floats and hole waffling.

I'm glad I did the sampler.  I have some ideas for my own designs, for the next time I do this technique.

And at some point, I'll start adding brocade, since that seems to have been a fairly common element of these bands in the archaeological record.

All of the above are subject to change as I think about it more and gain more experience and knowledge.

What's next?  I'm not sure.

A quick little post

I may add more to this post later.

This is the same triangle braid I did a few days ago -- 5 loops, V-fell, unorthodox (ring finger on one hand goes through middle finger loop of other hand and picks up the index finger loop of the other hand, hooking over the top).  I used 3 loops of light purple and 2 loops of dark purple.  I made two braids, to be given as a gift.  The finished braids are each about 20" long (not including the knot and fringe, of course).  I'll tighten the knots and trim the fringe before they're given away.

The braiding seems a little loose, which is interesting.  Is it the cotton rug warp?  Is it how I'm tensioning the braid?  Is it always like this and I usually don't notice?

The pic shows both the top and bottom sides of the braids.

I'm probably going to do a few more braids for giving away, with a variety of braiding structures and color patterns.  If I get more done today I'll add them to this post.  Otherwise there will be a new post later this week.  Crickmore's website is full of great inspiration.

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I did finally warp up and start an Icelandic missed hole tablet woven band, yay!!!  I started by doing all the early exercises that Wollny includes in the first part of the chapter.

Background pattern, yup.  This is basically the Sulawesi background done in 3-hole.

Then a few patterns that are simple diagonals-type patterns where the holes are there but don't form the tabby-ish pattern.

Then we start with waffling, first with the holes, then with the color thread (which means floats), and with each of the background threads (before and after the holes, and yes, also floats).  Motifs are filled with different textures in the center -- various floats and double-face and background pattern, etc.

There's also a little tacking stitch, to pop up a thread from a different hole to tack down some of the long floats, or just to do it because it's ornamental.

Wollny recommends doing it by turning two tablets one-eighth turn, to bring up a lower thread and drop the higher thread.  I found this kind of messy when looking for the shed.

If it's only one tack, it's relatively straightforward to lift the lower threads and drop the higher threads for that one row.  For several tacks, it gets annoying.

These actually are very similar to the Finnish half-turns, and in the end, that's what I found to be the easiest.  Do another turn on the two tablets involved in each tack (either up or down), throw the weft, then bring them back to their original orientation before going on to the next move.

So that was all fun -- seeing how Wollny approaches this technique and some of the variations and constraints she considers when designing her own.

Now that I've done the sampler patterns, I'll choose random stuff from Wollny's charts for a while, and quite probably for the rest of the band.  If I get bored or run out of patterns I like before I run out of warp, I'll switch to 3-thread Sulawesi motifs or play around with diagonals charts or twill charts or other techniques that look good with 3 threads.

I like how this technique looks, and I like how it's both related to float work and combined with float work.  And now I've done a bit of float work, too.  Well, floats that are deliberate.

The waffling technique is often used in conjunction with brocading, but I won't be doing that for this band.

It's interesting to me how this feels different from 2-thread, at least the way it's presented in this book and possibly in archaeological/historical examples.  They each have a characteristic texture, which is a lot of it, I think.  Also, the tablets are relatively stable without much effort, unlike 2-hole tablets.

I'm using 12 pattern tablets along with two 4-threaded edge tablets per side, for 16 tablets total.  As usual, the motifs are a bit elongated, though I'm trying not to tighten up too much on the weft when I throw it while still trying to keep it firmly packed down into the shed both before and after I turn the cards.