I have been rediscovering the treasure that is Masako Kinoshita’s old website L-MBRIC – Loop-Manipulation Braiding Research and Information Center. Beater-stands that allow a solo loop braider to make extra-long braids are just one of many fascinating historical references that she (and her contributors) documented in that trove of articles that she published as an annual online journal for over ten years.

Here’s the link to L-MBRIC issue 6 – a working link, by the way! It goes to the new LMBRIC site, which has 6 of the 13 issues with full functionality, and the rest as black-and-white scans of a hard-copy.*1 Scroll down to the second article to see three very interesting images of historic beating stands for loop braiding – from Japan, Egypt, and Bulgaria. (images will enlarge if you click on them). If you’re interested in other L-MBRIC issues I’ve recently updated my website’s index and guide to L-MBRIC – all the links in it now work(!) Articles are summarized, and two links given for each issue – one to the issue on the new website, and one to the archived original issue. (The index lives under the ‘ABOUT’ tab in my header menu.)

I’ve never tried making either of the two types of beater stands shown in Masako Kinoshita’s article, but about 15 years ago I corresponded with Masako, and she told me she had a foot-operated beater stand made for her. She said it worked, but that it was hard or maybe impossible to ‘unbraid’ when using such long loops – the beater doesn’t help with unbraiding, only braiding. Unbraiding is how you undo a braid to go back and fix a mistake. I unbraid a lot, so that kind of put me off of the idea of beater stands at the time, I figured I would stick with my low-tech tricks for making longer braids (see my post Longer Loop Braids).

But now that I’m thinking about it again, a beater stand might be a great thing to have, especially for making long and fairly simple braids! A mistake in a square braid barely shows, anyway, at least not most of them – and if the color pattern gets ‘off’ you can either ease back into it, or decide that you like the new color pattern even better.

Two different types of beaters are shown in that L-M BRIC article. One has a foot-operated mechanism to beat the fell (base) of the braid – like the beater above. The 2nd type is less complicated – it has a fixed, unmoving beater-post. The braider brings the loops forward (toward him or herself) to push the fell of the braid up against the stationary beater post to tighten. What’s not shown is that you would then need to raise the loops above the beater post to do the next braiding move, and then lower the fell back down behind the post again for the tightening move. So with the stationary-beater type of stand, the loops are moved up and down around the beater post. Whereas with the foot-operated beater, the beater moves up and down into the braid, while the loops stay fairly level.

The beater-stands shown in the LMBRIC article are larger and sturdier-looking than the tiny one in Beth’s photograph above, especially the Bulgarian stand. They’re also taller in back, so the growing braid can hang down the back with a weight attached to steady it and keep it taut. Maybe this smaller stand was intended for braids only up to about twice as long as one can braid comfortably without a beater, and the others were meant for braids of several yards/ meters long? The small stand almost looks too lightweight to withstand the pull of braiding, but it does have a rock or a bag of sand on it to weigh it down.

Masako Kinoshita mentions in the article that Japanese illustrations of foot-operated stands omit a feature that she considered crucial – how the braid can be moved forward (or do I mean back?) so that the fell (a.k.a. the point of braiding) stays in the same position relative to the beater-sword even as the braid grows.*2 Details of how the foot-operated mechanism works were also often omitted from illustrations, probably because the braiding guilds considered those details to be proprietary guild secrets that they didn’t want other guilds or individuals to ‘steal’.

However Masako and her builder were able to come up with solutions to these two questions, so I’m sure others can too. The other type of beater has no moving parts, and might work just as well. I’m not sure I would like a string tied to my toe to do the beating, anyway, though there are probably other options for operating a foot-mechanism!

I’ve added a section on beater stands to my old post on how to make extra-long loop braids. I don’t know why I never added it before now. Maybe I didn’t take beater-stands seriously enough. Masako Kinoshita certainly did – and the illustrations of them she found show that others did, too. Has anyone out there ever made or tried one? If you do, please let me know how you like it!

*1.
Unfortunately, L-MBRIC Issues 7-13 hadn’t transferred over to the new site by the time its old domain lapsed. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive, though! All the original issues can be accessed there, in full color with functional links. My guide and index to L-MBRIC has links (now all working!) to the issues in both locations, plus a synopsis of the topics in each issue. That’s why I’ve been browsing L-MBRIC a lot lately – I’ve been updating my guide’s old broken links to the lapsed L-MBRIC site. You can also find my L-MBRIC guide listed under the ABOUT tab in my menu bar on any page of this site.

The new LMBRIC website’s black-and-white scans of issues 7-13 are handy if you just want some quick info from them. However all the images are dark and blurry – the archived issues are much better.

L-MBRIC is a treasure, but it was always so hard to navigate that it was like a locked and buried treasure! It had no index of articles until the 13th issue came out with a rather weak one hidden in the back. I created my own index to LMBRIC so I would have some way of knowing what was inside each of the issues. My index gives a summary of the articles in each issue, so you can see what’s there and pick which one(s) you want to dive into.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to go over my whole website and update all my broken links to the former LMBRIC. Still on the list! In the meantime the broken links can actually be used if you copy them and paste them into the Internet Archive’s search engine (the “Wayback Machine“) to find the archived copy.

*2
When I look at the image above, I wonder if a moving sword-type beater might be functional for a range of several inches of braid. Then when the braid has grown past that point, the braider could just stop, set the loops down on a holder temporarily, and retie the start of the braid (at the attachment point on the tall post in back) so that the fell/ point of braiding moves back a few inches, and then pick up the loops and keep braiding. Would that be too much fussy readjusting? I like to put my loops down now and then to take a break from braiding, anyway, so if I only needed to retie every 5 inches or so that would be fine with me.