Fingerloop Braiding

Day 66: I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of my readers react to this post by saying, "Oh, we did that in grade school!" or "I learned how to do that in Scouts!" This is fingerloop braiding, yet another way to make cords to add to projects. It's most often done with five to nine loops, each one held on a finger or thumb, at least when you're working solo. For more complicated braids, you may need an athletic assistant or one who likes to dance. Since Tippy doesn't qualify in either "cat"-egory, I am limited to working with a pair of loops which do not extend from their anchor point past the reach of my outspread arms and until recently, my ability to do fingerloop braiding was hampered by a painful shoulder. At most, I can make a cord roughly two feet long. The process is simple in theory: loops are passed through one another, sometimes twisting as they go from hand to hand. In practice, a lot of variation can be achieved by varying the sequence, manipulating the strands differently, changing up colours and so on. I recently discovered this three-colour triangle braid made with five loops and thought it would be fun to try. The trick is in the accent colours. Rather than using a single colour for each of the two loops, each of the accent loops is made with two threads of different colours tied together at the end. The weave begins with the two accent loops on one hand with the same colour on top, and the three background colour loops held in the opposite hand. Once you get the hang of handling loops in the crooks of your fingers without dropping them, the work goes quite quickly, even with 8/2 cotton like I've used here. That said, triangle braids and two-colour loops are definitely beyond the scope of what I learned in Campfire Girls!