Ok, here goes with Part 2… This is about the kute-uchi loop braiding day in Joy Boutrup’s class at Braids 2012. (Her first day had covered historic European finger loop braids. The highlight had been several unusual braids and braiding methods that she learned through analyzing museum specimens—braids that are not recorded in any of the surviving loop braiding manuscripts.)
I just wish I had taken more photos, and asked Joy more questions!
It’s been weeks since the conference and I still keep having dreams about interlaced strands…
While the classes were the official focus of the conference, a lot of the enjoyment was also the fun and excitement of being around so many other people as interested in obscure textile techniques as myself, sharing some of these, seeing braid exhibits, chatting, (eating!), and exploring Manchester and the nearby city of Macclesfield. There were people from all over the world—a few familiar faces, a few whom I’d only known “virtually” before the conference, most whom I had never met before.
John Whitley (Seattle,USA), Dominic Taylor (UK), Tulvi Turo (Estonia), Joy Boutrup (Denmark)
And there were several participants who had come specifically for the two loop braiding workshops. To me this was completely amazing and wonderful! Continue reading
This post is just to say that I have added videos to my Jan. 2011 tutorial on the so-called “Spanish” braid of 7 loops that is the base braid for the 14-loop letterbraid:
14-loop letter braid, 17th C. loop braiding technique
The methods for this and two other 17th Century letter braids were recently decoded by Joy Boutrup, extending Noémi Speiser’s earlier research on the very inscrutable 17th C. loop braiding manuscripts.
There isn’t much, if any, information on-line about these alphabet symbol loop braids, which is why I am making this meta-post about a previous post. Continue reading
An intricate and unusual 7-loop braid —the word for braid was spelled some funny ways in the 17th C. manuscripts— is the basis of the 14-loop alphabet braid.
Spanish samplers, bicolor loops, dmc embroidery floss.
Joy Boutrup described this 7-loop braid in her recent groundbreaking analysis of the 17th C. letter braids.
Continue reading
I’m almost finished madly braiding a letterbraid to send in to the Braid Society‘s Traveling Exhibition*—still fiddling with the braidlets at the end.
(click photos for more detail)
The orange is DMC cotton embroidery floss, doubled, so 12-strand, and the light green is an unknown brand of silk knitting yarn of similar weight (sport? or maybe thinner). The braid is a little over ½” wide.
The color theme was “citrus” this year [this was Dec. 2010, for the 2011 Traveling Exhibition] . I’m usually pretty open-minded about colors, but I hated this theme—every combination of citrus colors I came up with looked terrible.
Finally my sister helped me find two citrus colors that didn’t seem completely hideous together. (Sorry about the glare in the photos—in real life the orange is duskier, and the other color is a very light green.) When the color choices resolved down to 2, it dawned on me that I should make a letterbraid.
for visiting Loop Braiding!
