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.

Colorful Oseberg tablet woven band (and a little bit about the Sion 269 purse braids)

 Hmm, I guess my "next band" wasn't in the Icelandic Missed Hole technique.  I saw a Sally Pointer pic of a colorful Oseberg-pattern band and decided that I needed one, too.  Luckily Oseberg is easy to chart up, especially with the fairly clear photo that was posted.  This version is symmetric and has 11 tablets.

Hers is probably in wool.  Mine is the usual big-box store cotton.  She used black, light green, yellow, and a pinkish red.  I don't have enough black cotton left, so I changed it out for purple.  And the reds I have are a little too bright, or something.  I switched to orange.  What the heck, let's make sure we cover all the secondary colors, right?

The backside is not quite the same as the front side.  I have a small length of the reverse side along the bottom of the above pic, and you can see the blip of orange between the parallelograms, while of course the orange is in the middle of the parallelograms on the front side.

You may not be able to make out the colors in the above pic, so here's a close-up.  The colors are still a little washed out compared to the actual band.

The weaving went as quickly as one might imagine.  I like it a lot.  It's very cheerful and colorful!  It's destined for a gift.  It's the usual 66"-ish long and about 1/2" wide (12mm/167cm).

You can see how the twist of the thread ply interacts with the twist of the tablet-weaving.

Maybe I should make a few more of these in various bright colors, just for fun.  Or in between other, more complicated projects.

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Yesterday I nerded out about the Sion 269 purse braids with a friend.  Now someone else knows how to make them!  The friend might be a little more concerned about the reversed vs unreversed version than is necessary, but it's still a cool little detail that not everyone would have noticed let alone cared about.  And it does say something about the group of purses -- even with apparently the same yarn, different knitters and different braiders were probably involved, given these small differences in braiding technique and also the differences in knitted gauge.  I'm not sure the yarn is the same -- it's hard to compare the exact color shades and thus the dyelots from one photo to the next.

My friend randomly arranged the loop colors in a pleasing order and instantly re-created one of the color sequences of the actual purse braid.  Boutrup/Speiser speculated that the braids were made by the same person or at the same time since a lot of these 6-loop unorthodox braids have the same or similar color sequences, and that seemed statistically unlikely if multiple people were making braids.  It might just be something about how the human mind works instead.

I've changed my mind a bit on how the appearance of the 6-loop A-fell unorthodox Sion 269 purse braid changes based on whether the loops are taken reversed or unreversed.  There really is little or no consistent difference, and my current theory says it's as much or more about how we do the moves and tighten the braid as it is about the exact path the loops take.  So, unless one is doing bi-color loops, the braids come out looking pretty much the same either way.  At least with the acrylic yarn I use for experiments.

I should do some Slentre style braiding experiments.  Those Skjoldehamn wide braids (and the Hedeby apron braid) -- how easy are they using the Slentre technique?  They're easy enough to do freehand, especially for long braids.  But I have a small speculation that might need a bit of experimental data; perhaps the Slentre fingerloop braiding method, first recorded in the Faroe Islands, is the last stronghold of a much wider braiding tradition?  Testing this idea with some of the archaeologic braids could be interesting.  Probably not, but you never know.  Many can probably be done with other fingerloop methods, with loops used to hold the tension even if loops are treated as single elements, as with the pigtail braids.

Fingerloop Braid of the Day (5-loop triangle fingerloop braid)

Today's quick braid.  The top photo is the front side and the bottom is the back side.  Or whatever they're called -- twill vs hopsack or whatever.

 

I'm thinking that V-fell finger dexterity is something I should work on, to be able to do those 9-loop braids more smoothly.  My thumbs seem to be working OK but my ring and pinky fingers are moving more awkwardly.  Dunno if it's the way I'm holding my hand when there are loops on the thumbs, or if it's my ring and pinky fingers in general.  So I looked at Ingrid Crickmore's site for inspiration.

This tutorial, and in particular, the little 5 loop braid in the first photo, grabbed my attention as something quick and easy to do.  Mostly, it was because I also want to play around more with color patterns and designs and stuff, and because I'm still thinking about unorthodox braids, reversed and unreversed loops, and the like.  The tutorial is here:  https://loopbraider.com/2017/08/07/uo-triangle-5-7-9tut/ and because I felt like it, I watched the video for it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M8MrVx9rCA&ab_channel=IngridCrickmore

Crickmore calls this a Triangle Fingerloop Braid of 5 loops.  And so it is.

This is an unorthodox braid, done V-fell.  The ring finger on one hand skips the ring finger loop on the other hand, goes through the middle finger loop on the other hand, and picks up the index finger loop from over the top (reversing it).  Walk the loops, repeat on the other hand, etc.  With this braid, the loop nearest the traveling finger is skipped over and the loop closest to the about-to-be-picked-up loop is gone through.

Let's see if I can write it out...

Loops on left hand, on a, b, and c fingers.  Loops on right hand, on a and b fingers.

Rc skips over Lc, goes through Lb, and takes La reversed (hook over the top of the loop).  Walk the loops on the left hand.  Lc skips over Rc, goes through Rb and takes Ra reversed (hook over the top of the loop).  Walk the loops on the right hand.  Repeat.  Tighten the braid as necessary.

The yellow doesn't have enough contrast with the white, but that's OK.  The braid was indeed quick and easy to do, of course.  It helped that I was careful to have all the loops the same length.  My fingers seem to be reasonably dexterous.

I showed both sides of the braid since Crickmore often only shows the top side and I wanted to see what the other side looked like.

There's another page on the site that diagrams out the color patterns for the braids in the triangle fingerloop braid tutorial page, and it's here: https://loopbraider.com/2017/08/30/uo5-11-triangle-patt/.  The braid I did is the top one, which she calls Bicolor Chevrons.  I might have done this exact braid before, or if not, something similar from her diagrammed-out choices.  But I wanted something nice and easy, so I could go back to basics and work on my fundamentals, and this was a fine choice.

I know that if I take the loops unreversed, the colors on the V will be mirror images...  I might do that at some point just to see if/how it changes the braid's shape.  I can also take an occasional loop or two unreversed semi-randomly (or deliberately) to change around the pattern every now and then.

Dunno if I'll crank out a few more 5-loop triangle unorthodox braids, or if I'll move on to 7-loop braids next, and whether they'll be triangle braids or what Crickmore calls D-shaped or some other unorthodox or even orthodox braid(s).

Today's fingerloop braid twiddles

 

Neither is from Sion purse 269.  Whew!

The top braid is a 6-loop pigtail-style braid.  It's the fingerlooped version of the Skjoldehamn 6-element braid.  Fingerlooping is fast and efficient, but so is freehand braiding.  I do notice that my braid has a bit of a spiral to it.  I wonder why?  I did this A-fell, on the theory that A-fell was the more common braiding style in Europe.  Maybe I should try it Slentre style.

The bottom braid is a 9-loop square braid.  I'm still pretty clumsy at it -- transferring loops from my pinky finger to my ring finger is not yet smooth, especially if I don't want to drop the loops on my other fingers or my thumb.  It didn't help that not all of the loops were exactly the same length.  But I'm slowly getting better.  I did this V-fell, of course.  On my left hand were 4 yellow loops and 1 pink loop.  On my right hand were 4 teal loops.  The pink yarn is slightly thinner than the others, apparently, since it's nearly invisible in the braid and the photo.

I want to improve at the 9-loop braid since there are lots of fun things to do with 9 loops.  Also, I should start doing fun braids again in addition to trying to figure out actual historic braids.  (Not that I figure out much, since I'm sure the braids are pretty obvious to most experts, which I assuredly am not.)

Today's Sion purse 269 6-loop unorthodox fingerloop braid exploration (so far)

 

The above pics show the fronts and backs of the braids.

Both are unorthodox 6-loop fingerloop braids, A-fell technique, index finger goes through middle finger loop before grabbing the little-finger loop on the other hand.

Both are done with 6 different colors, using 2 strands for each color.  For each strand, I did one long loop, hooked it around my tie-off point, and put a finger into both loop ends.  If that makes sense.

The top one (both pics) was done with the loops reversed, hooked from the bottom of the loops.  The bottom one (both pics) was done with loops unreversed.

Conclusions:

The loops-reversed braid is a little wider and flatter than the loops-unreversed braid.  The loops-unreversed braid is narrower and more domed.

The loops-unreversed braid is less nicely interlaced on the flat side of the braid than the loops-reversed braid, but it's still possible that's something about how I braided and tensioned things.

In the loops-unreversed braid, I can see little peek-throughs of the previous-color strand.  That corresponds to what I see in the Sion purse photos I've been talking about, and is consistent with my initial conclusions about how the drawstring braids and purse strap braids were done.  I can see them in the loops-reversed braid but they're not as obvious.

Now that I've worked with these braids for a while and know what to look for, I can sort of see the flat/interlaced sides of the braids in the Kornbluth photos in addition to the sides with the Vs.

I think that I'm done with this braid for the moment, at least in the context of trying to understand the braids on Sion purse 269.  But I've said that before, so who knows?

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I'm pretty sure my next tablet weaving project is going to be in the Icelandic missed-hole/3-hole technique.  I'm curious about what Wollny calls "waffling" -- areas where the tablets turn forwards and backwards to keep the missing-hole tablet position on the top (or bottom) of the band, so that there are floats on one side and a tabby-looking area on the other.  She has a fair number of charts in Tablets at Work, so I can do a sampler and check out some of the different characteristics of this technique.