Today I decided to watch Ingrid Crickmore's video to see the braid she calls a D-shaped 7-loop braid (https://loopbraider.com/2015/04/21/uo-dshaped-7tut/) I can't remember if I've done this braid already, but if not, then I definitely played with it today!
If I haven't done the braid before, it's because she doesn't give instructions on her website for how to do it. One has to watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOFL5qigiU0&ab_channel=IngridCrickmore. I mean, it's a fine video, but a few sentences or a diagram would have been MUCH faster.
But now the video has been watched, and the braid has been braided. It's very cute. Of course. And it will be entirely easy to play around with all kinds of color/texture variations.
I've tried to fold the braid in the pic so one can see both sides of the braid, and also see where I switched back and forth between unreversed and reversed loops. Those are the "2 ways" referred to in the blog post title and also in the video. I used acrylic worsted weight yarn, though the white yarn is a little thinner than the blue and the green.
Ingrid Crickmore on her video said that reversing was best done by coming over the top of the braid rather than the bottom -- she seemed to think that the first twist direction made a more pleasing braid. That is interesting since twist direction was one of the things I thought might be a variable for fingerloop braiding variations. Yup. It might be a very minor variable, but I guess it can make at least a subtle difference.
This is an unorthodox braid, meaning that the operator finger doesn't go through all the loops before picking up the traveling loop. With the V-fell method that Crickmore uses, the pinky finger goes through the pinky and ring finger loops of the other hand, then over the middle finger loop, before picking up the index finger loop. Loops can be picked up either unreversed or reversed without changing the overall appearance of the braid all that much (not counting colors, of course).
I used bi-color loops, obviously, in the same arrangement that the video uses. There are a lot of fun color variations on the website. I'm looking forward to playing with them. I'll also play around with other 7-loop unorthodox braids, of course. I've already done some -- there are a lot of different things to play around with.
One of the things I've been teaching lately is a 5-loop unorthodox braid, the braid that so many people worldwide seem to do. I was looking at instructions for a brode lace of v bowes (https://fingerloop.org/patterns.html#n01) and realized that it was a different unorthodox braid that I had initially assumed. For the brode lace of v bowes, which in the Medieval manuscripts is done with the A-fell technique, one skips the loop next to the traveling loop. But it's also easy to skip the loop next to the operator finger and go through the loop next to the traveling loop instead. Both look perfectly respectable, though I think I might slightly prefer the appearance of the first one (where you skip the loop next to the traveling loop).
Just as an aside, for the unorthodox braids where you skip the loop closest to the operator finger and go through the loop closest to the traveling loop, Ingrid Crickmore refers to them as triangle braids. The braids she refers to as D-shaped braids skip the loop closest to the traveling loop. Or so I currently understand. I think.
I'll have to take pics of my little 5-loop samplers and add them to the blog, either revising this post or making a new one. I did give most of them away, though. Maybe I'll make a new one. I usually do several braids to show people -- pigtail (i.e. don't go through any loops), brode lace of v bowes, divided, square/round, flat, the unorthodox braid where I go through the loop next to the traveling loop instead of next to the operator finger, and so on. People like the divided braid to use as a hanging loop or buttonhole, etc.
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Aisling's tablet weaving book finally arrived. Yay! Tablet -Woven Bands from Egypt of the early Byzantine era (395-641) and later, by Silvia "Aisling" Ungerechts. This is the color version, purchased from a European vendor. The USA version was in black and white (which I don't think was known before the publisher delivered copies to USA vendors) and the charts had zero contrast and thus were unusable. The color one is fine. I've done a few of these bands already (ones that are on her website or were in her TWIST articles about a few of these bands). I'm looking forward to exploring more!
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