Somebody just requested instructions for a two-person team of braiders to braid a ten-loop letterbraid, so I contacted Joy Boutrup for permission to reprint her instructions for the 10-loop Nun’s Book letterbraid here. She answered yes, and says they can be shared as long as you credit her and cite the publication they are in. Joy deduced (from incomplete-to-nonexistant directions in the original 17th C manuscript), and published these instructions in her and Noémi Speiser’s 4-part publication European Loop Braiding, Investigations and results. All four parts have been out of print for a long time, and are hard to find used. Joy’s instructions are on p. 56 of the second publication in the series – European Loop Braiding, Investigations and Results – Part II: Instructions for Letter Braids in 17th Century Manuscripts, by Noémi Speiser and Joy Boutrup, published by Jennie Parry, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9562620-1-1.

My 2014 tutorial for this braid shows my method for following Joy’s instructions as a solo braider, with all the left braider’s loops on my left hand, and all the right braider’s loops on my right hand. It didn’t show the traditional way a team of two braiders would have made the braid. It includes downloadable pdfs of 3 extra letter charts that I devised for the letters I, J, and Q (the second video shows me following one of these), and has more information about the braid. (for example, Joy also deduced a second way to make these same lettershapes – it’s faster to do, but a bit harder to learn, and uses a different set of charts in her book.)

Joy’s instructions are in bold below.
Steps 1-4 of her instructions create a one-person 5-loop Spanish braid, which is what each of the two braiders will be braiding when they join forces and braid together. All loops are taken without turning them – straight, unreversed, open, whatever the term you are used to! When not braiding lettershapes into it, the braid should be in two separate layers, a dark braided layer on top and a light braided layer on the bottom.

Ideally, both braiders should learn the 5-loop braid of steps 1-4 first, and be able to braid it automatically and easily before attempting the combined 10-loop version together. This 5-loop braid is a nice braid on its own if you turn the loops – quite different from a 5-loop square braid – but best to learn it first without turning loops, to prepare for braiding the letterbraid. Then learn the combined two-person 10-loop braid of Joy’s instructions, initially as a completely divided, two layer braid – not attempting to make any letter shapes. If any light colored threads from the bottom layer show up in the dark upper layer, or if the two layers of the braid join up anywhere and don’t remain completely separate, that means you are making a mistake in the braiding moves (or in the loop exchange between the two braiders). Once the basic 10-loop braid feels fairly natural to braid, you’ll be ready to use the letter charts to braid actual letters.

NOTE: L=left hand, R=right hand.
a, b, c = index, middle, ring (either the finger, or the loop on that finger, depending on context:
“Take Ra” means “take the loop on Ra”

Joy Boutrup’s instructions [notes within square brackets are mine]:

Set bi-coloured loops on the hands as follows:

Left hand worker (1)
L1 a, b, c, R1 b, a

Right hand worker (2)
L2 a, b, R2 c, b, a

Black up on all hands [when palms face each other, the dark shank of each loop should be uppermost; the light shank of each loop lowermost on the fingers]

The instructions will only treat the left hand worker, the other works in mirror image.

1. Use one of the fingers on L to go through Rb and take Ra, move Rb up onto Ra and deposit the taken loop onto Rc
2. Use Rb to go through the loop on Rc and take Lc
3. Use a finger from R to go through Lb and take La, move Lb up onto La and deposit the taken loop onto Lc
4. Use Lb to go through the loop on Lc and take Rc.
5. Exchange. [the two braiders exchange their closest index loops, one through the other in a particular way] The loops on the inner hands [the left and right braiders’ neighboring two hands] can be moved down onto fingers b and c during the exchange. [see my note further down about this step]

Joy’s instructions above don’t go into details like tightening. Each braider should tighten their own loops by spreading them apart after any loop has moved from one of their hands to the other. There is no point in tightening after a loop has only been moved between fingers of the same hand. I find that it is less important for the two braiders to tighten loops against each other (after they exchange loops at the end of each row) – most of the necessary tightening has already been done by then, and more effectively than by pulling against each other.

When the two braiders combine their 5-loop braids and work together in braiding a 10-loop braid, they braid in mirror-image from each other. (The left braider would start braiding as in Step 1 of the directions above; and the right braider would start as in Step 3. By that point they should already know the braid, though, so they won’t have to follow these instructions! They just mirror each other’s moves. Make sure both braiders start braiding with 3 loops on the outer hand, and 2 loops on the inner hand (outer hand is furthest from the other braider; inner hand is closest to the other braider).

Step 5: the loop exchange between the two braiders.
Joy’s instructions don’t detail HOW to do the loop exchange move, because that was covered in other works by her and Noémi Speiser, she just advises to first shift the loops on the two braiders’ neighboring hands down one position to make the loop exchange easier to do. (Only one of the two braiders really needs to do this, the one I call the “initiator”.)

That loop exchange move between the two braiders is the same as in many other 2-person braids. I show a step-by-step photo sequence just for this loop exchange move in my 2013 post Braid a 10-loop braid with a friend (which teaches a doubled square braid, not a letterbraid). The photo sequence detail is below the video. Scroll below the video a little ways to get to it.

The letter charts (following the letter charts is an additional process from making the braiding moves):
My 2014 solo-braider tutorial includes downloadable pdf’s for 3 of my own letter charts: for the letters J and U (apparently J and U began to be used as early as the 16th C., but I guess still weren’t “standard” by the 17th C. – i and v were often used instead where today we would use J and U); also my chart for an alternative version of the letter Q, which to me looks like a lower case “q” or backward “P” in the original Nun’s Braid font. (Not a “period” thing, the Q’s in both other known 17th C . letterbraids do look like a capital letter Q).

Column headings in charts: the column headings in my downloadable charts refer to the fingers used for my solo-braider method. Charts for two braiders are exactly the same, except for the column headings (each column is for a particular finger).

For two braiders: the left 4 columns are for the LEFT braider; the right 4 columns are for the RIGHT braider, and the headings of each individual column (left to right across all 8 columns) should be:
La Lb Rb Ra – La Lb Rb Ra
(La=left hand index finger, Rb=right hand middle finger)

Only the index and middle fingers (“a” and “b”) have columns in the charts, because loops on the c fingers (ring fingers) are never turned.

You can access all Joy Boutrup’s letter charts for the Nun’s book braid either in her book (the ORANGE charts on page 57), or on Gary Mitchell’s Finger Tips site here (link will open in separate tab). His charts show the appropriate finger labels on each column for BOTH my solo braider method, and for two braiders. His headings may be slightly confusing when you first look at them – you can ignore the 1’s or 2’s, as shown in “L1b” or “R2b” ! The 1 and 2 refer to the left and right braider, as at the top of Joy’s instructions, but that’s already clear from being on the left or right half of the chart. Just read his heading R1b as Rb (right B finger) and you’ll do fine.

However, before following any letter charts, both braiders should learn how to cooperate in making the underlying two-layer 10-loop braid. It will really help if the braiding moves are automatic before you add in the complication of following a chart, which is a row-by-row process of turning different loops in each row, before doing the braiding moves.

My 2014 tutorial for making this braid as a solo braider has more details, and a video (the second video in the tutorial) on how to follow a letter chart. Before doing the braiding moves in each row, the braiders check that row in the chart to see which loops need to be turned on the finger before braiding the row.

The chart doesn’t actually tell you “turn this loop”. In each row, it just shows DARK or LIGHT for the index and middle fingers of both hands of both braiders. If the chart shows DARK for the left braider’s left index finger, that’s the color that should be uppermost. If the dark shank already is uppermost on that finger, then no turn is needed for that loop. But if that loop’s LIGHT shank is uppermost, then the braider does turn it, to make the dark shank come up and the light shank drop down. There are two loops on each hand that each braider must check against the chart, and turn or not turn on the fingers, before doing each row of braiding. The two braiders will not (necessarily) turn the same loops. Each braider needs to check the chart and then check their own loops to see if any need to be turned before braiding that row.

Different letters are different widths. Since they run lengthwise along the braid, some letters – and their charts – have many more rows of braiding than others. “I” is the shortest, and I think “W” is the longest. The charts for the letters don’t necessarily resemble the letters, by the way! The columns in a chart correspond to the left-to-right order of the loops on your fingers, not to the left-right order of where the threads end up in the braid itself.

Sadly, you will find that the color changes you make in any row of braiding don’t become visible in the braid until after a few more rows get braided in. This means that once you notice a mistake, it requires unbraiding more than one row to go back and correct it. To begin with, just expect that there will be mistakes in your first practice braids. Later, after you are more used to the moves, do practice unbraiding, because when braiding an inscription, it is well worth the annoyance of unbraiding, rather than having to start all over again when a tiny mistake renders a letter illegible. Unbraiding means reversing the loop movements to undo the braid, it doesn’t mean dropping the loops and trying to pick them out of the braid (will not work!) There’s a bit of a learning curve, but unbraiding is not rocket science – Kumihimo braiders do it all the time, and it’s just as useful for loop braiding.

I call this type of color patterning “pick-up,” and have a series of posts and tutorials on it in simpler braids than the letterbraids (click on Pickup in my upper menu, or under the 3 lines on a small screen). Pick-up requires using bicolor loops, and exchanging those two colors between the two layers of a braid, to creates patterns in opposite colors on the two sides of the braid. The letters show (backwards, though!) in the opposite dark-light configuration on the back of any of the letterbraids.

Last updated September 14, 2025

© 2025 Ingrid Crickmore
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