The Kumihimo Corner

This is a variation of the small cherry blossom braid. Where some moves are normally repeated, this does them once and produced a very different but interesting and stable braid. I was taken with the way the edges of this braid looked like the edges of crochet, so I decided to try crocheting into one of the edges, and worked this little cachepot in single crochet, working into the back to mimic some purses I've seen and decreasing as I went.

This is the small cherry blosson braid worked much as described in Kumihimo by Charlene Marietti. I chose non-traditional colors and worked it around a core of softflex wire that had been threaded with seed beads, dropping a bead down at regular intervals. After completing the braid, I formed a pendant on it using a mix of Sculpey translucent and Promat Gold to give the look of river tumbled quartz with veins of gold.

While prowling the aisles of the local rat maze called Walmart, I chanced upon some nylon rat tail cord in a very appealing multicolor. I grabbed one 4 yard packet and one of purple, then went home and made this braid in less than an hour. It's a simple 8 strand spiral that was started by looping the center of the loose threads onto an odd bit of wood fromWanderingWolf . The strand ends are sealed with careful dabs of Fray-Chek.

Braid-Embellished Beret

One of the things I like to make on my knitting machines is radial-knit berets from my hand spun wool that I then full and shrink down to size in the washer and dryer. Sometimes they seem a bit too plain and want a firmer edge to fit more comfortably on my head. That was the case with this one.  It was plain white Romney and languished unused for quite some time before I decided to throw it into a dye pot with some skeins.  Once it was dry, it still wanted something, so I stitched on a length of 16 strand flat braid I had made on my maru-dai using some mercerized cotton knitting yarns. I wanted to use the whole length, so I played with pinning it until I settled on these crossed loops.

These delightful antiques really work. They do not belong to me. They belong to a mechanically inclined friend named Dorothy, who runs them on steam power at shows but with a quieter electric motor at home. To watch them in action is sheer delight. The bobbins move in a complicated path around one another, much like a May pole dance, and the braid forms above the center. Powerful gears draw the finished braid along, keeping everything under the proper tension. The machine on the left makes a flat braid using 17 strands and presses it between heavy rollers. You can see the finished braid coming down the slide at the left. The machine on the right makes 16 strand round braids with or without a core. The finished braid travels around the wooden rollers, then toward the back.

I hope you will have the chance to see some of my work in person at one of the shows listed in "Where's Halla?" on my Home World Page.

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