Craft Design Online

At last, I have almost finished the flat 10 thread experiments. One of them has been done, undone and redone countless times.

I found the structure of it interesting – when I first made it, the front made me think of a ladder, and I could see gaps through the braid between the rungs. Next time I made it, these rungs had disappeared and the braid cross section had changed from a semicircle to a trapezoid.

This frustrated me for a long time – what had I done differently the second time? How would I describe how to make it so people would see the braid they expected?

Eventually I realised that the key difference was the tension on the threads in one particular move. First time round, I had taken all the threads across the centre of the marudai. Later on, I was sitting rather than kneeling, my arms were lower, and I was more inclined to take the threads around the outside of the marudai. And that was enough to make the difference.

Looking at Makiko Tada’s Comprehensive Treatise (vol 1), some of the braids have instructions to drop the threads rather than put them down. Experiments with this braid showed me that this had the same effect as taking the threads round the sides. The threads involved had just crossed at the front of the braid, so if they were pulled tighter across by dropping or movement, they pulled the front of the braid closer together.

Personally I like the wider form better, and this will be the one I use for Marudai Painter, but I have sometimes found that pulling the ends of the braid apart loses the ladder structure, and the narrower form returns. So I think that the narrower form is more stable, and probably the one to aim for, but if you have a use for a braid where it is never put under tension, the wider form will do just fine.

I’ll be calling this braid Flat 10, version 4, and I’ll update this post with a link once it is on our website.

I seem to have several braiding projects that I have started and not finished. At the moment, I am still looking at Chrysanthemum braids on the disk, an experimental braid using some ideas from kongoh gumi, and some ideas for 10 thread flat braids.

They’ve all been interesting to work on, but haven’t quite made that final step to being ready to put on the website. There are any number of excuses I could give – I didn’t have the right threads available, one project was taking up my disk so I couldn’t use it for anything else, Christmas, and the list goes on.

Unfortunately, I have lost the momentum on these projects and need something to help me get kickstarted into finishing something before I start something else.

If I am honest, starting and not finishing has tended to be a fault of mine for a long time. I have any number of cross stitch projects in the house that I started and didn’t finish – the one that I most want to finish is a Pooh Bear alphabet. I started it before my oldest child was born – 12 years ago. I was going to finish it and put it up in his bedroom, but I am not sure he would welcome it now! I was going really well at it, I loved the bright colour blocks, but I started getting backache, and that slowed me to a crawl, and then a stop. Then I was going to finish it for my next child – although they were born 10 years ago now. Hopefully I’ll finish it before I have any grandchildren. I have a few years yet for that

I decided to try making Kiku-kara II from the Comprehensive Treatise of Braids I on a kumihimo disk. I was inspired to try this after Elliott Evans said that it was similar to Kyo Kara Gumi in “Essence of Japanese Braiding” (which I don’t have), and that he thought Kyo Kara Gumi would work on a disk. You can see what he has made on a marudai in his blog: particularly More Silk Braids and More Kyo Kara braid.

Kara Kumi braid on a kumihimo disk

When I first looked at Kiku Kara II, I thought “no way on a disk”, but this is the result so far. The moves are not so bad as they look – a lot of the criss-crossing starts from the outside, so you don’t need to add extra disk moves to make space to move threads into, which is probably one of the hardest parts on a disk. At least for me as I feel like I am not achieving anything during them.

I am not happy with the tensioning so far, and the braid is uneven. I may try doing this on a marudai and seeing if this makes it any easier to get it right on a disk.

If anyone has any tips…?

Bright colour pattern for "Hollow 16" braid

One of the things we do before making a new braid available on Marudai Painter is choose a pattern that we hope looks nice to others, and gives an idea of the possibilities of the the braid in a small space. Often we have several ideas, but don’t keep track of the others once we have made our choice.

With “hollow 16″, we had fixed on a pattern for a while, but decided to change it when we realised it was the same as one in Creative Kumihimo. With some braids this is difficult to avoid as the shape of the stitches points the patterns in a certain direction, but we felt that this braid had so many possibilities we would try and find something different.

Here are some of the other patterns we considered before making our final choice (the images are links to the patterns on Marudai Painter).

Red, white and black checquer pattern for "Hollow 16" braid

This gallery contains 3 photos

Although this is not the first post in my new blog, it is the first one to be written since I moved the blog onto the internet instead of my home computer. I had wondered if I would have to rewrite the first 2 posts, but WordPress made it quite easy to transfer everything.

So, to everyone reading this, welcome to my braiding blog.

We’ve got a few braids here that we have started getting ready for putting on the internet. Once we think we have got the threads mapped properly, I make a design that takes my fancy and check it works. Most of these braids are short – just long enough to see the pattern come out (and hopefully not long enough for me to spoil it with mistakes). Some of these braids are attached to keyrings, so we are getting quite a collection of these. Others get carefully pulled apart leaving the threads available to reuse. Sometimes I find taking the braid apart by reversing moves on the marudai is quite a good way of understanding the braid structure better.
I expect there are a lot of people out there who enjoy making braids without necessarily having a plan for what they are going to do with them Jewellery seems to be quite popular – either a simple friendship bracelet, or I have seen some stunning beaded pieces. I can’t remember how I first came across this article, “That’s Nice Dear”, but it reminds me just how versatile braids can be.

Of course, different shapes of braid are better for different things. the next braid we are planning to put on Marudai Painter is a round hollow braid. When we’ve made it, it tends to squash flat pretty easily, but it still looks nice. The version we’ve (almost) finished is a 16 thread braid in Creative Kumihimo and also Comprehensive Treatise of Braids 1, but, sometime, we are going to try and make larger versions of it. Murray has an ambition to recreate a tartan pattern, but that will probably take 70+ threads. I am not sure whether I am up for THAT much of a challenge

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently using a kumihimo disk instead of a marudai.

It’s reminded me how much nicer the marudai is to use, although I did enjoy being able to braid in the spectator gallery of the local swimming pool. I don’t fancy trying that on a marudai!!

We’ve recently started putting instructions for making Marudai Painter braids on a kumihimo disk as well as a marudai. I’ve not seen instructions for these braids, so I’m working out what I think they ought to be and testing them before putting them on the site. Because the threads sit in slots on a disk, you have to take them out and put them in different slots so that there are gaps in the right places. With a marudai, you can usually squeeze the threads where you want them, or gently slide your threads to one side to make space. Far easier.

As well as working out instructions, I have been making videos for some of the braids. I felt this was particularly useful for Shippo, as it is difficult to describe pushing parts of the braid together and easier to demonstrate it. The video process has been quite time consuming and I’m not going to do one for every braid. I end up undoing and redoing the braid several times so that I can make sure the threads are all in the right starting positions. And for someone who does not like listening to her own voice, working on the soundtracks isn’t much fun either.

I hope you’ve found the videos I’ve made useful, and if there’s a braid you’d particularly like a video for, let me know.

Sometimes it feels like I have been braiding for ages. Well, I started with my daughter’s friendship wheel around 4 years ago, but I didn’t progress beyond designs for that until this year.

We worked out rules for making 32 thread kongoh gumi braids quite soon after we got the disk, but even though we knew it was theoretically possible, I didn’t try making one. And then I did! Not the easiest thing to do on a kumihimo disk. To be honest, I didn’t actually try to do it on a disk at first. I had read a bit about kumihimo and marudais, seen pictures of them, and decided to experiment. I had no real idea how interesting I would find kumihimo at that point, so I didn’t want to spend much money.

I decided that the key things were a support with a hole in (kitchen roll), something to help me figure out which threads should be paired together (a small embroidery hoop marked with kitchen bag ties) and weights on the threads (lace bobbins). I used 3 strands of DMC on each bobbin, and gave it a try.

Oops – a counterweight on the growing braid was needed too. That was a cloth bag with a few marbles in it.

This set up was far from perfect. The bobbins tended to tangle together, and I couldn’t see my braid. Mistakes were made, and the pattern didn’t come out right. I hated my makeshift marudai, and I didn’t want to undo the braid and try again.

Although I hated my “marudai”, I still wanted to try more kumihimo braiding. I got Jacqui Carey’s books (Beginners Guide to Braiding: Craft of Kumihimo, now published as Japanese Braiding: The Craft of Kumihimo and also Creative Kumihimo), and persuaded my husband to make me a wooden marudai.

I wanted heavier weights, so I used matched lengths of copper pipe flattened with a hole for threading a wire through. These progressed into something a little more like traditional Japanese tama – film cannisters and medicine pots with pennies inside.

My set up still isn’t perfect (e.g. my marudai is made from softwood – it is vulnerable to damage, and I keep sandpaper near by to smooth it off), but I love it. I’ve been doing some work on a kumihimo disk recently, and even though I find it a takes a while to set up, the marudai is miles better.

So far most of my marudai braiding has been hopping around Creative Kumihimo trying whichever braid takes my fancy. I compete with my children for use of the marudai. My son (A) loves 8C (shippou), one of my daughters (B) loves 8D, and my other daughter (J) is experimental. Sadly (for me) it is J who has the marudai at the moment, and her braid is taking a while to make. Strictly, I think J may be weaving on the marudai as she has several threads that do very little and one wraps around them, but she is enjoying and making, so I don’t plan to argue about that.

I am planning to use this blog to talk about my experiences, explorations and experiments in braiding. Probably most of the braids I try making will end up on Marudai Painter in time, but it takes a while to go from braiding to having it ready for the web.

Almost finished the 10 thread flat braids

Getting things finished

“Chrysanthemum” Braids

Hollow braid patterns

The new blog

Braiding on a disk

Starting a blog

Craft Design Online

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