I've done a bit of fingerloop braiding in the past few weeks. Here are pics of them with a bit of blather about them. I tried to pose the braids so that all sides could be seen for those braids where different sides had different appearances. They're all about 12-13" long counting the knots and fringes. For future reference -- lengths that are about 36" long (about 17" after folding in half and knotting) will give a braided area about 10-11" long, with enough extra at each end for knots and evenly-trimmed fringes.
One fun thing -- for the most part, when I dropped a loop (or more than one loop), I was able to recover fairly well without disrupting the braids' patterns. Yay!!!
This is an 8-loop loop exchange braid, done in a spiral color pattern (all the green loops on one hand, all the purple loops on the other). There's not much to say about this one except that yup, it's a loop exchange braid. I like how it kind of looks like a twisted cord at first glance. But it isn't.
This is a 7-loop D-shaped V-fell braid with loops taken unreversed, with 4 bicolor loops (purple/yellow) and 3 purple loops. As you can see, the bottom is purple and a little chain or zigzag of yellow crawls along the top.
This is a 6-loop unorthodox A-fell braid (the same one as the Sion braid) with the loops taken reversed, with 3 loops of blue, then 1 loop red, 1 loop yellow, and 1 loop red.
Here's another 6-loop unorthodox A-fell braid with loops taken reversed, with four loops of blue, one loop of white, and one loop of green.
I initially tried it with a bicolor loop of green/yellow, and with the loops taken unreversed so they would mirror themselves around the center of the top (with the chevrons). I didn't like it. It looked looser than with reversed loops and needed careful tightening, and even then, the colors just weren't popping in a way that I liked. However, for future reference, the bottom loop of the bicolor loop was the color closest to the center of the braid.
This one is a 7-loop orthodox square braid, V-fell, loops taken reversed (obviously). It has 4 loops of white, then 1 loop black, 1 loop yellow, and 1 loop black.
And here's another 7-loop orthodox square braid, done as above. With this one, there is one loop of red and 6 loops that are bicolor black/white, with the black as the top loop (in the initial starting position, 3 loops on each hand).
This one is kind of interesting because it almost looks the same as the white/black/yellow band, in that one side of the square has single-color chevrons and the other side has the trapezoids or harlequin pattern or half-chevrons or whatever you want to call it, with bicolor chevrons. The way they differ can be seen by looking at the red loop in this braid vs the black loop in the other -- which side of the braid has a chevron vs a half-chevron. I'm not sure it was worth the effort to set up bicolor loops for this particular color arrangement.
I tried another variation with the bicolor loops on one hand being black loop up and the ones on the other hand being white loop up, but that formed vertical stripes. Duh. I liked the half-chevron thing better. It could be interesting for a future braid, though.
Anyway, much fun was had and the braids are mostly with their intended recipients. These short braids are a very comfortable size to work with, not a lot of awkward stretching near the beginning while doing braid tightening. They still take a while to do because big-box store #10 crochet cotton is thinner than worsted weight acrylic yarn. But it takes less time than DMC Cebelia #30! And braids done in these finer-than-worsted threads are attractive, in my opinion, with a good gauge/thickness/hand and with color patterns that are at a good scale to be visible but not showing unevenness or other silly stuff.
I used Ingrid Crickmore's site (loopbraider.com) for inspiration on color patterning possibilities, but these are all braids I know how to do without needing to reference all the wonderful fingerloop braid experts out there. I've labeled this post with all of them anyway and might well have forgotten a few. After all, that's how I learned how to do these braids, by reading all the sources and then practicing while trying to observe.
I'm not sure what I'll do next. There's some tablet weaving on my agenda (commissions) over the next few weeks. Dunno beyond that.
I taught my class last weekend (one-step disk braids, with the 9-strand move-the-extra braid as the example) and it went well enough. I didn't have a lot of students so I can keep this in my repertoire for a while before I run out of victims. Heck, by now, it's probably time to re-start teaching braids that were in heavy class rotation a few years ago, since there may well be a new set of people who weren't around then and who might be interested.
