Simple and cute. It ended up being roughly 3/4" wide and a bit more than 90" long. The cats helped with the measuring, so there's some uncertainty in the length.
This is destined as a gift. On to the next band! It too will be a simple F/B pattern, also destined as a gift.
I've been dithering about the Next Tablet Weaving Project for a while. While I'm dithering, I started this simple little band that's intended as a gift.
The pattern is charted out nicely on Twisted Threads here: https://twistedthreads.org/pattern/2iubdKQLn5dQWoT8N
I'm pretty sure I've seen this in a lot of places over the years, not just on Twisted Threads. But since there's already a chart, I'll link it and use it.
The chart calls for 17 tablets, all 4-threaded. It's a threaded-in 4F4B pattern, though I'm treating the outermost tablets (1 per side) as edge tablets and only turn them forwards. I'm using my usual Aunt Lydia's #10 cotton for warp.
I found some green DMC Cebelia in my doily leftovers and am using that for weft. I think it's #20. It shows little green dots where the tablet direction switches, but I decided I wanted to match the green edges rather than the yellow background. The request was for at least 3/4" width. I'm barely able to achieve that. I'll have to consciously try to keep the weft tension loose-ish yet still keep the width consistent.
The back is cute, too, though nowhere near as well-defined as the front. I'll share a pic of that at some point.
I'm getting low on several colors. Do I fill in the colors I'm low on so I can still weave with this stuff? Or do I let my supply run out, using the last bits for braiding and inkle weaving, and move on to a different thread? I'm not sure. It's actually kind of difficult to find easily available relatively inexpensive thread of decent quality in a good range of colors, especially if I want to get the stuff in person. I'm sorry to say that this big-box-store cotton #10-ish stuff might not be a half-bad choice. I'm probably going to do a few of these simple bands as gifts, and it would be good to have more options for the colors I can select for each band. Sigh. So off to the big-box crafts stores I'll go, I guess. Or do mail order.
Yesterday I did another little fingerlooping class. This was a freeform drop-in thing.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I may add more to this post later.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
I'm gonna be doing more experiments with the Sion A-fell unorthodox 6-loop braid, but for grins I quickly tried the 4-loop version.
Ooh.... It's fun and educational!
I cut 2 loops and folded them in half, which is why this braid is 2 colors. I started with one color on the middle finger and the other color on the ring finger.
The 4-loop A-fell unorthodox braid: the index finger goes through the middle finger loop and picks up the ring finger loop on the other hand. I started with my right hand, but it's probably very similar or the same if one starts with the left hand.
This makes a triangular braid which spirals slightly as it grows, though of course some of that could be me or the yarn I'm using.
First I took loops reversed, hooking from the bottom of the loop. I really like this one! It forms 3 Vs, one per side (the bottom is slightly looser but it's really not noticeable unless you look for it). The colors are nested V V V V, alternating colors, rather than being a spiral.
Then I took the loops unreversed. The braid is a little tighter. The shape is a very high domed D with a shallow groove in the bottom. The top looks like a round braid and the bottom looks like a square braid, and like above, there are three sides to the braid if you count the top D as two of the sides. There is one V on each side of the D and the other two sides are lined up as / or \, so it looks like a V on one side of the braid is connected to an A on the other side, in a longish ellipse. If that makes sense. The top of the braid looks like A V, with the inner part of the A connecting to the inner part of the V of the next-down level of the braid. The bottom is a slanted line(s) that goes across the groove, which connects the outer edge of the V with the outer edge of the A on the previous-up level of the braid. It too is a very nice braid.
Then I took the loops reversed, hooking from the top of the loop. This is very similar to hooking from the bottom. I think (but I'm not 100% sure) that hooking from the top is not quite as crisp, and my guess would be because hooking one way slightly twists the plies of the yarn, while hooking from the other direction slightly untwists them.
This is a pretty fabulous braid and I will keep it in my repertoire. I will eventually see what happens with loops of different colors, bi-color loops, etc., and also compare it to a 4-loop orthodox braid (this is an orthodox braid on one side but not the other). But wow, this is a very quick braid to make and gives a lot of bang for the buck.
If I get to 6-loop braids today, I might add on to this post rather than make a new post. Or I might make a new post anyway.
Dunno if I want to draw out the Noemi Speiser style track diagrams for these braids. Eh, probably not. Or at least not yet.
In my last post on this subject, I added the following a little while later:
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So......
Did the braiders not care if the loops were reversed or unreversed? The reversed seems slightly flatter to me, but I'd need to do more careful experiments, removing or duplicating other potential variables, to be sure.
If the braiders didn't care, then this may be evidence of two different braiders. Although it's possible that a braider would switch back and forth, it is also possible that different braiders had their favorite or customary way to make this braid.
If the braiders cared, then they were interested in something about the difference between the two methods.
Maybe I'll make a few more braids and see if there are consistent differences between taking the loops reversed vs unreversed (and maybe also with reversing the loop in the other direction, i.e., hooking it from the top instead of the bottom). Also, I should start working with doubled strands at some point, maybe in a finer yarn or thread. If I'm feeling terribly ambitious, I can try some other unorthodox braid structures, too, such as going through two loops instead of one. Though given how easy it is to do the unorthodox braid going through the middle-finger loop, I'm pretty sure that's what the braiders would have done if they were cranking this braid out in industrial-ish quantities.
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My current tablet-woven project is almost finished, yay! I'm still having fun with it. I'll throw in pics and ramble about it in another post when it's finished. I'm already thinking about what I might want to do next.
It's been a while since I've done a Karisto/Pasanen band. I was flipping through Tablet Woven Treasures for inspiration and decided to do Band 41, which was the top edge of a skirt from Kaukola, Kekomäki (p.190-191). This is a cute little 4-threaded band that uses the diagonals technique with half-turns (along with a little bit of 3/1 twill and double-face sensibilities) and has tubular edges. I like the motif.
The book shows the band in blue, yellow, and red. My cheap cotton stash is starting to get low, so I ended up choosing different colors that I had a bigger supply of. Mine is aqua/teal, sage green, and burgundy red. It's pretty reasonable, I think. (The pic's colors are not quite right, but close enough.) The weft is random leftovers, as usual. Since this isn't necessarily going to be a gift, and since both sides have tubular edges, I'm not going to worry about possibly needing to change my weft thread partway through the band.
There are 11 tablets, 7 for the pattern and 2 on each side for the tubular edges. One thing I'm noticing is that one side curls under a lot more than the other. Hmmm. Dunno if it's my technique and tension, or if it's something about how the tablet orientation interacts with the yarn twist and the path of the weft. I'll try to loosen up a bit to see if it helps. If it is tension, I'm not sure which direction is tighter than it should be.
It's going pretty quickly. There's nothing very difficult about it, but I do have to pay attention. I like it so far.
Mostly unrelated: There's a book that's been around for a while on Anatolian tablet weaving (Tablet Weaving from Anatolia and the Ottoman Court). Sarah Goslee's review (https://www.archaeologicaltextiles.net/pages/anatoliaTW.html) mentions kivrim aka ram's horn style motifs on some of the bands, and that these motifs weren't found on bands (in the book's photo section) that were pre-17th century. So there's an approximate date for when kivrim patterns were known to exist. They go back to at least the 17th century in that part of the world. So there.
I tracked down more of the old online information about the cords on this bag. There was something in L-MBRIC 7 from Joy Boutrup about them, though only through a link. I was too real-life busy to download all of the L-MBRIC newsletters back when they were posted, so I have been using the pdf scans that have graciously been shared. It's not always clear what is a link vs just random text so I probably missed out on some of the info in the newsletters. However, the link is still alive in archive.org, yay, so I was finally able to read it.
Here are the archive links: https://web.archive.org/web/20190914150706/http://lmbric.net/ is, I believe, one of the last complete (as much as possible) web-crawls of the website.
Here is the article as linked through L-MBRIC No. 7: http://lmbric.net/n7/sion/LM_NEWS2.HTM
Note to myself: I should go through all of the archive.org links and re-save them, checking out anything that is linked. Some of them are in color, which the pdfs don't always preserve. Plus, I want to make sure I have copies of things that were non-obvious links in the newsletters. Sure, even these aren't 100% complete, but they will be good to use in conjunction with the scanned pdfs. Oh, and it's cool that there are several articles about Sulawesi braids in the newsletters, along with a quote along the lines of all the old/traditional tablet weavers knowing all the local fingerloop braids, too.
Back to the article on Braids on Relic Purses in Sion, Switzerland, by Joy Boutrup. Boutrup worked in conjunction with Noemi Speiser to examine these purses. In person. Which means that I trust their expertise, and they had access to evidence which is not easy to determine from the insufficiently-detailed photos online (https://www.kornbluthphoto.com/SionPurse269.html, as is in a previous post).
They say that the main fat purse braid on bag 269 is an unorthodox braid. Six strand, yep, that's what I could tell. But unorthodox rather than orthodox.
Interesting....
That means that I'm not interpreting the photo correctly that supposedly shows the joining of strap and body on purse. Unorthodox braids do not split into two separate braids when loops are taken unreversed rather than reversed. So... the drawstring braid (or braids) are probably separate from the purse strap. And duh, the drawstring color order is different from the color order on the strap. So, yup, different braids.
Also, I cannot see the backside of the purse or any of the straps. I have to take it on faith that Boutrup and Speiser did, since unorthodox braids would be distinctive and they are both experts whose knowledge and experience I deeply respect. I will say that the braid being unorthodox does explain the slight flattening of the strap braid in the photo, with the Vs of each color being a little too easily seen in the same photo instead of being on opposite sides of the braid.
(Hmm, the article doesn't say that Boutrup and Speiser were able to examine the backside of the purses or the cords. But still, I trust their expertise to be able to distinguish between orthodox and unorthodox braids.)
Time for more playing around! I cut 6 more loops, again paying no attention whatsoever to the order of the colors, and tried different things.
Doing a loop exchange (a loop on one finger exchanges with a loop on another) with 6 loops, without one braid going through another, is kind of annoying, so I gave up on that pretty quickly. I had mentioned it in my last post, so wanted to try it this time. It's easy enough with 4 loops, as demonstrated by the class I recently taught, but it would require more coordination of extra fingers than I wanted to deal with to set it up for 6 loops. Someday I'll return to this idea.
I also did these experiments using A-fell (i.e. index finger as operator finger) since that's the more common technique in the European fingerloop braiding manuals. Braids done as A-fell vs V-fell, especially unorthodox braids, seem to look different even for what seems to be the same structure. So I wanted to remove that as a variable.
The above photo is a first try at the Sion braid. The braiding starts at the right and goes to the left. I used six different colors though I made no attempt to line them up in the right order.
First is a loop exchange braid. Rb and Ld swap strands (with the left hand loop going inside the right hand loop), then Rc and Lc, then Rd and La. Repeat. And nope, this is not the braid used for the strap of the Sion purse.
I didn't do a version where the elements were kept separate, though. Hmmm, I wonder if that could be a kongo gumi equivalent? Anyway, I don't think the structure will look too different from the one where loops travel through each other, and it's not gonna be the right structure anyway. I'll try to remember to test it next time.
Second is a pigtail braid, where the outside element goes into the middle, first the right hand and then the left hand. No loops go through each other.
Nope, that's not it, either. It's too flat and the colors don't repeat quite the same way.
Third is my initial hypothesis for how the braid was created -- as a square/orthodox 6 strand fingerlooped braid. I did V-fell, using my little finger as the operator finger. The finger went through the strands on the other hand and picked up the other-hand index-finger loop, taking it reversed, then I walked the loops as necessary. On one hand there will be two loops to go through while the other hand will have three loops to go through.
Yup, I still think that's it. I also did it for a while with unreversed loops, to make sure it made the proper split braids that looked about right for the actual purse loops. As far as I can tell, it matches the photos of the original.
I did another stretch of pigtail braiding to make sure I understood what I was doing, since the 6-strand pigtail braid is used for the Skojdehamn outfit as a decorative edge for the clothing. It can be done freehand, but also with fingerloop methods. I also wanted to be very sure it was different from the square orthodox braid, which it is.
And I finished up with a little bit more of the orthodox braid as a square and as a split braid.
Yay.
Here is a photo of the original braid:
And where it splits:
Here is mine again (just the area of the square braid and where it splits in two):
And a side view of the braid so you can see that it really is little Vs like the original is.
One more thing -- the original braid uses double strands.
