Continued Exploration of the Braid on the Knitted Sion Bag 269

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.

Hopefully the pics are clear enough.  It should be the front and back of the experimental braid.

I tried a few things.  I wasn't particularly careful about tension or anything like that and I tended to drop loops occasionally.

I went through only one loop on each hand.  (I could have done 2 loops on one hand and 1 on the other, of course).  I tried both going through the loop next to the operator finger, and going through the loop closest to the loop that was about to be taken.  I also tried reversed vs unreversed loops, though I didn't try reversing from above the loop, since below the loop was easier to grab.

Going through the loop closest to the loop about to be picked up is interesting but looks rather different from either a square braid or an unorthodox braid going through the loop next to the traveling finger.

You can see how the colors spiral up, with a short bit going in the other direction.  It looks that way on both sides.  So this is kind of a cool braid on its own even though it is not the braid used on the actual purse.  To try to be more clear, finger A travels through the last loop on the same hand before picking up the loop on finger C or D of the other hand.

Going through the loop closest to the traveling finger gives the traditional look of an unorthodox braid, and the braiding itself is very smooth and quick, very little need to count or pay attention. It has the characteristic flat/rounded top with two Vs and a flat interwoven backside.  It looks pretty similar whether I take the loops reversed or unreversed, maybe a bit looser/flatter with unreversed loops but that could just be my technique at that point in the braid.

The simple unorthodox braid looks pretty similar to the square braid along the top, except that it is a bit wider and more domed than the square.  I did a bit of the orthodox braid in the middle of my sampler, for purposes of comparison with the other things I tried.

So, what was the braid used for the drawstring?  The same?  Something different?  It looks like the same braid but it appears to be a bit skinnier than the strap.  But who knows?  And some of that could be done by adjusting the braiding tension.  All the braids have 6 braiding elements, each of which consists of 2 strands, and the dyelot of the colors matches across the braids and also the purse.

I can't make enough sense from the online pics to understand what I'm seeing about how the purse strap was attached, how the draw strings were connected, etc.  I believe there are two drawstrings (since the Vs go in the same direction for both when they can be seen), one for each side of the purse, and that they are tied together at each end.  I believe that the strap is separate and it must somehow be sewn onto each end rather than going through the drawstring holes.  Also, where are the starting and ending parts of the strap braid?  One end is shown in a photo but I honestly have no idea what's going on there.

It is entirely reasonable for the braiders to have done an unorthodox 6-loop fingerloop braid with the braiders only going through the loop next to the traveling finger on the way to the loop that is about to be picked up.  That is fast and smooth and sufficiently symmetric for each hand.  So, given that Boutrup and Speiser say that this 6-loop braid is unorthodox, that is what I would currently go with.

I should try this style of unorthodox braiding with other even-number braids.  (I've mostly done it with odd-number braids, which is more traditional.)  And I should also do more fingerloop braiding in general since I do enjoy it and want to keep increasing my skills and my knowledge.  Though maybe I wanna warp up another tablet weaving project.  Or knit myself a Monmouth cap.  Or drag out a spinning wheel and some roving.  Or see what length heddles I prefer for my inkle loom and warp up a quickie band.  Etc.

Is this the end of my exploration of this braid on this purse?  Probably not...