This post is titled:

New Flat Braid

It's braiding week here on the blog! I've been braiding for about a year, and have finished up a handful of braids recently, so, uh, if you don't care about kumihimo at all, see you next week!

Shige Uchi in Red, White and Black, plus some others

I'm still looking for the best flat braid to use for lacing type purposes. Previously, I'd settled on the hira nami "flat waves" braid as a nice flat and wide braid that was easy to produce with eight bobbins. However, Sharon recently gave me a copy of Jacqui Carey's book, Creative Kumihimo, which has a flat braid type I'd never tried. Carey labels it "8G", but checking around I find that others call it the Shige Uchi "luxurious" braid.

Shige Uchi is essentially the same braid as the edo yatsu hollow braid, but instead of the threads crossing over at the top to make a round braid, they reverse direction! This "unzips" the round braid into a flat braid with a little bit of cupping to it.

As is usual for me with a new braid, I messed up a bit. First, I got a couple of threads crossed, changing the color pattern, and then later I accidentally switched back to the familiar edo yatsu pattern. I managed to unbraid all that, but just couldn't get the shige uchi running again. Instead, I switched through hira nami, yatsu sen, and hira kara patterns so that I could compare finished widths. My previous choice for wide, flat briad ahs been hira nami, but this braid is just a little bit wider. If I can just do better following the pattern…

2009.09.21 at 12:00am EDT

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