I managed to squeeze in a few machine-embroidered belt favors for Kingdom awards before it was time for Coronation.
These are all from my standard embroidery library, sewn on a gray heavy trigger-type cotton fabric.
Took a second swing at this project. Here it is up on sawhorses in my workshop/garage:
It’s huge! It’s 4.5 feet long and a foot wide. It fits in the trunk of my car ok if I fold the rear seats down, but it’s way too big. Probably at fault is my desire to use 1by8 for the sides. To keep the length in proportion to the height it’s just way too long. Maybe I’ll try again sometime with 1by6 instead. That would make it only about 40 inches long by my reckoning. Compare the image below with the original painting.
I’m also pretty sure I should be making my battens narrower, and probably from the full 3/4″ thickness of board instead of my 1/2″ planed-down thickness. As a bonus, here is an image of all the tools I needed to construct this Mark 2 chest, stored in the Mark 1:
There’s not much you need, really, to build a simple chest.
In yesterday’s post, I was mentioning 16-strand medallion-cord braids, and that reminded me to post about something nice that happened to me recently. The American Kumihimo Society (of which I am a member) is trying to get their new web site rolling, and introduced a new feature where they post pictures of members’ braids that were inspired by classes they took through the AKS. One of the reasons I started doing more 16-strand braids instead of so many 8-stradnd braids was because when Sharon and I went to the AKS Gathering in 2017, we took a class in 16-strand braids from Rosalie Neilson. So, I submitted a picture of my most recent set of Aethelmearc braids and the picture was accepted for publication!
I’ve been doing a bunch of 16-strand braiding these days. All of my donated medallion cords for a few years have been 16-strand braids because I started getting a little bored of 8-strand all the time. It always bothered me that while most of the 16-strand braids in Jacqui Carey‘s Creative Kumihimo are expansions of some of the 8-strand braids in the same book, there was no doubling of the “8J” Yatsu Sen / Yatsu Rai pattern. “No problem,” thought I, “we can figure this out.” Hence:
I haven’t seen this in any books or anything, so as far as I know I made it up. It wasn’t that hard to figure out, though, so I would not be surprised if somebody else provides this pattern somewhere.
I started making these printable “index card patterns” more than ten years ago. They are a pretty good reference, but only if you already know how to braid on the marudai. This is the first new one I’ve made in a while. I think the last one I made was this “Double Maru Yotsu” card in 2012. Feel free to copy these or print them out for your personal use, just don’t use them for any commercial purpose without asking my permission.
Have fun! I’m working my first try at this braid right now, and it’s pretty challenging.
Years ago, I printed out every issue of the Loop-Manipulation Braiding and Research Information Center News and put them in a binder as an analog reference work. Later, this reference became invaluable when the original website became unavailable. Recently, I was informed that the site’s author, Masako Kinoshita, had passed away.
I scanned in my printouts, and made them available to Ms. Kinoshita’s daughter who is rebuilding the web site. She has given me permission to keep them on my site as well, and I have put together an index page to help people find the PDFs.
https://www.ee0r.com/lmbric.net/
Please make sure to credit the late Masako Kinoshita and the authors of the individual articles if you use this information for anything.
