A few fingerlooped braids

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.

Tubular Tablet Woven Cord

I saw one of those tablet-woven tubular cords on someone's website and suddenly decided I need to make one.  Today.  Right now.

So I did.

This pattern is seen on a purse strap of a 14th century German purse in the V&A Museum.  Apparently the chart/description is from an article in the Spring 2008 issue of TWIST, but I found it on an archive.org copy of a silkewerk.com page.

This one is 9 cards, all 4-threaded, all with the same orientation.  There are 3 cards each with red, yellow, and white.  (I picked the same colors as the original seems to be, more or less.)  The original is silk, while mine is the usual cotton.  I used #10 cotton for both warp and weft.

This is a cool pattern because you can get it to bias and thus make spirals.  When the cards are oriented \ (Z-threaded) and turned forward and the shuttle thread goes from right to left, it spirals to the right.  When the cards are oriented / (S-threaded) and the shuttle thread goes from left to right, it spirals to the left.  I assume that mixed directions don't spiral, or don't spiral as well.  One can also flip cards or turn them backwards to change the direction that the warp is twining -- warp twining direction and spiral-weft-thread direction go the same way, if I understand it correctly.

The basic concept is like I-cord in knitting -- the weft always goes in the same direction, and one tightens it to bring the edges together.  This makes a tube instead of a flat band.

The original zigzagged at random intervals, so that's what I did, too.

The cord is roughly 1/4" in diameter and roughly 63" long.

When weaving, the band is all stretched out and straight, though it wants to rotate.  As soon as the tension is off, the threads relax into spirals.  It's fun to watch.

I found that the weft tension was looser one way than the other.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe the thread ply direction also affects things?  Or it's because I turned cards backwards rather than flipping them?  The loose bits go away pretty easily if I wiggle the cord.  I was silly and used a white weft thread to connect the red and yellow.  I should have had white on one side instead of both being colorful, to minimize the little white weft blips.

This is really cute.  I will play around with colors and different numbers of tablets when I make more.

There's also an article in ATN 21 that shows a tubular cord, monochrome, on 16 tablets, but with half-turns between the weft spirals instead of quarter-turns.  I might try that someday to see what it looks like.  Assuming that it's a correct description -- sometimes the explanations evolve.

The photo of the purse is not particularly high resolution, but those sure look like fingerlooped braids coming off of the tassel.  They might even be the ends of the purse strap; I can't quite discern what's going on.  The drawstring looks like it could be a twisted cord.  I'm not sure if the braid on the sides is embroidery or a braid that's sewn on.

The museum's description is of course quite perfunctory where narrow wares are concerned.  Oh, well!

This is my first tablet-woven tubular cord.  It won't be the last.  I can now officially add this technique to my mental repertoire of cord-making methods.

Today's fingerloop braids

Well, so far.  Maybe there will be more later today, though if so, I'll try to wait until at least tomorrow to inflict them on my imaginary audience.

This is a 7-strand braid.  My fingers really did not want to cooperate in walking down loops! Dunno if that's because it's a 7-strand A-fell braid or because of the angle I held it at or my fingers just weren't having it.

This is a pigtail-type braid.  The place I saw it described/explained was very careful to take the loops reversed in a particular direction.  Hmmm.  I tried reversing it in the other direction and not reversing it at all and it didn't seem to make any difference.  Then I figured out that this was a braid called "A Lace Broad Party" and the instructions on silkewerk.com (from a saved version on archive.org) specifically mention that it makes no difference whether or not the loops get reversed.  Hah.  Dunno if it makes a difference with bi-color loops.  Probably not, since no loops go through any other loops.

Anyway, this is apparently Tollemache 62 and thus a genuine historic braid.  No loops get pulled through any other loops.  The empty index finger picks up the pinky-finger loop from the other hand.  The loops get lowered, repeat with other hand, etc.

It's pretty much the same thing I was doing with pigtail-style braids with 5 and 3 loops.  And indeed, it can generalize to other numbers of loops, and it can also be done freehand, and can also be done by going through some loops while going under/over others.

It's a pretty cute braid, of course.  But wow, I think I need to work on finger dexterity and finger independence!

Also, although I'm still playing around with 4- and 5-loop braids, I'm ready to also start exploring more braids that have more than 5 loops.

This yellow braid is actually 2 different braids.  I changed about halfway through.  They are both 4-loop braids.

The first one is from a handout I apparently found online somewhere.  It is from Eowyn de Wever, "Fingerloop Braiding; A sampler of four braids on 8 loops and 2 colours", from a class that she taught at some point since these are referred to as class notes.

The braid I did is "The Square Braid on 4 loops." This is supposed to be a helpful transition braid between an 8-loop spiral and a barleycorn-type braid.

I did that for about half or a bit more than half of the length of the braid, then got tired of dropping loops and my fingers not wanting to move loops around.

The second half of the braid is from The Weaver's Journal 37, Summer 1985.  There's an article in there by Noemi Speiser, "Unusual Braids Produced by Loop Manipulation", p.15-18, 67-73.  A lot of it is about the joys of track plans.  Luckily she includes the basic fingerloop manipulations as a guide for how the plans correspond to the braids.  I mean, I do understand what the track plans represent.  But I'm still having trouble backing out the finger/loop movements from only the track plan.  Clearly I need to practice more and do a few exercises in working with both the track plan and the fingerloop diagrams at the same time, or taking the one and generating the other, or both.

The braid I did is the 4-loop braid from Figure 8 on p.70. It was a lot more satisfactory than the first braid, not nearly as annoying to do.  Speiser says that this braid was found on "an old European purse."

I'll have to try these again using loops of different colors.  I may also switch the pigtail braid to V-fell to see if it's less annoying that way.

It's kind of fun to see how the two yellow braids look relatively similar (as monocolor braids) even though they have different structures.  Also, the Speiser braid tends to spiral.

Each braid has 3 faces, I think.  For the Speiser braid, they are all Vs or herringbones.  For the de Wever braid, there are 2 faces of Vs/herringbones and one that looks sort of like the flat face of a 3-loop flat braid (i.e. it shows interlacements).

All of these braids were meant as samplers/experiments, which is part of why the tension is inconsistent.  Well, part of it was general new-braid and finger-dexterity awkwardness.  But I really did want to see what the 7-loop Lace Broad Party looked like at different tensions.

I'd also like to work through the rest of the braids in the Speiser article as well as doing the braid in the connected article by Adele Cahlander on p. 15-16, "Detective Story: Unraveling the Mystery of a 7-loop braid."  Which also means I need to go back through her sling-braiding books/articles to look for fingerloop braids.  The last time I really looked at them, I was more interested in the square braids that are done freehand or on a marudai.

And alas, there's nothing about fingerloop braiding in the few things I have, including her book on Sling Braiding in the Andes.  Harumph.  I don't recall anything about fingerlooping in the book referenced in the article.  The book referenced by Cahlendar was that Andean knitting book by Cynthia LeCount, and in particular, the strap on a Bolivian monedero.  As I recall, most of LeCount's book was about the amazing knitted chullos.  I'll have to see if I own that book and if so, if anything is said about the strap or about braiding in general.

Inspired by the above, I did a few more samplers.

I tried to do a 3-loop braid, going through 0 loops, taking the loops alternately above and below the uninvolved loop.  I don't know if I was messing up or what, but I kept undoing what I'd just done.  Frustrating.  Similar for going through 2 loops while taking the moving loop reversed on one side and unreversed on the other.  It's apparently difficult to count to 3 and/or keep my fingers straight as to which is the operator loop, which is the moving loop, and what happens to loop between the two.  Or it just ends up not looking very interesting.  Sigh.

So I added a fourth loop and played again.  That was more successful!

It's hard to see, but first I did a combo 3-5 square braid, using V-fell braiding, inspired by Ingrid Crickmore's mention of the 6-loop braid done as a combo 5-7 square braid.  For one hand it was like a 3-loop braid and the other hand was like a 5-loop braid.  I took both loops reversed.  Yes, success!  It is a perfectly lovely little braid with a triangular cross-section, easy to do as long as I can count to two.  Two sides have herringbone Vs and the third shows a small, neat interlacement.

Then I took the loop reversed for the first move (when my operator finger went through 1 loop on the other side) and unreversed for the second move (when my operator finger went through 2 loops on the other side).  This makes a nice little flat braid, yay!  There are 2 Vs on each side.

Then I did the opposite -- taking the loop unreversed when going through 1 loop, taking it reversed when going through 2 loops.  This does not make a flat braid.  It's similar to the first, a triangular cross section, though I think all three sides are Vs and none show an interlacement.

Finally, since there wasn't much length left, I did the 4-loop spiral braid, varying whether I reversed loops and also varying which loop went through which loop (i.e. always the right loop on the outside, reversing the left loop, versus always the upper finger loop on the outside, reversing the lower finger loop).  They're subtly different but not enormously so, as I think I already knew.

Dunno what I'll do next, but I have a lot of potential things to try.  Plus there are some tablet weaving things I want to play with.  And I'm vaguely feeling the urge to pull out the marudai.  But I'll probably keep fingerlooping for a while even if I do start something else.