Recently, I've applied to teach at the American Kumihimo Society's 2028 Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. I submitted a class proposal to teach Kuteuchi, the finger looping, and how to make a multi-braider chevron pattern. I'm pretty sure I'll get accepted. Just one problem when I submitted the proposal; I didn't know how to braid it. But I do now. I started with my single braider chevron pattern, an earlier post about SCOT braids, and thought what if we kept it simple and d

Six months since my last blog update, sorry for taking so long life sometimes takes interesting turns. I’m a member of a reenactment...

With a little device called a footbeater from Japan. Essentially a beater that can rotate vertically and activated by pulling a cord attached to the beater with your foot. Here is a more in depth paper I wrote a few years ago on my thoughts about foot beaters , their purpose, design, and construction . For today, we'll just go over the essentials. "Ok, it's a Japanese tool, how does that help me?" Unless you're going for complete authentic reproduction methods, all the foot

So why do you call Linking "Overtwist"? I do so to make reading about loopbraiding clearer and to separate two different "Linking" moves from each other. On Masako's website lmbric.net she does not go over Move E, as far as I know it's only talked about in depth in her book and possibly some of her articles*. If you're reading a page describing how to make a particular pattern, you have to pull from context which linking move is being talked about and this can be frustrating

Leader cord, it's what I call the loop that connects the braid to the anchor (or counterweight for marudai), and I’m sure that there are other names for it. Used in kumihimo to quickly attach and detach braids from the dai with minimum waste of the braid. Its use in kute-uchi is a bit more problematic as there is no clear visual or written evidence of their use. In fact, a few drawings (all of which are Edo reproductions of earlier drawings) of kute-uchi appear to have the br

In reality loop braiding only needs one tool, something to beat the braid into shape. Most cultures used the assistance of a second...

Earlier I mentioned that the word 'Kumihimo' was modern, a search through Japanese archives, including the National Diet Library* in both...

Updated from original post to include new information. This post is a twofer, what is kute-uchi and how Japanese loop braiding got its name. Kute-uchi is Japanese loop manipulation braiding, both finger and hand strap braiding; as mentioned by Masako here https://web.archive.org/web/20160116224853/http://www.lmbric.net/ILh/ILh.html . In loop manipulation braiding, each loop provides two elements or threads of a braid that move in unison. These dual elements for each loop mean

Kumihimo, a type of Japanese braiding that came to mean all types of Japanese braiding then a shorthand for braiding on a Madurai and...

'Wait, I thought all Japanese braiding was called kumihimo?' Not really, only by the most strict definition of kumihimo's translation...