A dear friend of mine from way back who is a martial arts enthusiast had bought himself a Japanese sword, and he asked me if I would make a sageo cord for it. It was my pleasure to do this for him. I was able eventually to find some dark blue silk yarn in sufficient quantity to make this 9.5 foot long 7/16 inch wide 9-strand shigeuchi braid.
I started with about 13.5 feet of material, 10 ends of silk yarn per strand, and worked this braid on my sankakudai. Quite a bit of uptake, really. The amount of material gave me a nice heavy braid, and the silk makes it soft and flexible for its tightness. The use of yarn makes the braid a little fuzzier than I would prefer, but it’s mostly clean and only a little fuzzy. It took me about a year to get all my ducks in a row on this one, but like I said, eventually.
