Tag Archives: tutorials

Video for Doug’s braid

12 Jul

7-loop fingerloop braid, "Doug's Braid", made by Ingrid Crickmore

Here’s a video to go with my tutorial—a few posts ago—for Douglas Grant’s Round Spanish Braid of 7 loops.  The video also demos a new color pattern for the braid.  It’s shown above in mercerized cotton sport-weight yarn (elann.com’s Lara). That’s about equivalent to using doubled strands of embroidery floss.

For this color-pattern, the seven loops are all bicolor—five loops blue+white, two loops blue+black. Be sure to arrange them on the fingers as I show in the video. (My original post has instructions for several other color patterns, plus the necessary loop-order to follow for setting up your own color patterns.)

This is not a beginning level loop braid. It’ll be much easier to learn it after first learning 5-loop, then 7-loop square and flat braids, and then the 7-loop Spanish braid (a rectangular braid).

0:00     Intro (slow start—skip ahead if you don’t want to wait through it.  Slide the bubble under the video to any of the time points shown below.)
2:57      Color pattern set-up for this pattern
3:33      Braiding moves, very slowly
7:50      Slightly faster
10:49    Faster
12:08    One unbraiding move
12:59    A look at braid’s pattern
16:30    Last look at pattern, also at the divided section forming a loop at the top of the braid.

On all these youtube videos, you can change the quality of the video by clicking on the circular icon that looks like a gear (just under the video, towards the right—it displays after you start the video). Pick a lower quality if you have a slow server, or if the video isn’t playing smoothly. I suppose a higher quality will sharpen the image. On the far right is an icon to click for full-screen mode.

If you click on the “youtube” button on the same taskbar, you’ll be taken to a youtube page to watch the video. There, if you click “more” to expand my description under the video, you’ll see a timeline that is actually clickable—meaning, you can click on any of the timepoints in the left column, and the video will start playing right at that point! (I love this! Only learned about it recently and have been trying to add it into all my videos.)


Gary’s pattern-planner

14 May

I think all my links to Gary’s pattern planner are now updated to go to his new URL. If you’ve bookmarked his old site, you’ll need to switch over to this one.

A reader of this blog has come up with the first interactive braid-pattern generator for a fingerloop braid that I’ve ever heard of!  A few months ago Gary Mitchell contacted me to tell me that he was working on a pattern planner for the 7-loop Spanish braid.

7-loop spanish fingerloop braids, various bicolor patterns

Various patterns, spanish braid

This was a huge surprise!  I didn’t think many braiders had even tried the tutorial I had posted for this braid. I learned this 17th C. loop braid from a recent monograph by Joy Boutrup,*1 and last year I posted a video-tutorial on it.  It is a really fun braid, flatter and more intricate than the 7-loop square braid, but requiring no more loops (or fingers) to braid it. Continue reading 

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