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

Hopefully this post won't be too long, but I warn you it will be a bit picture heavy. The good news is that this is the second to last known moves post, the last being linking between braiders. I'll keep posting about some experimental braid moves or combinations in an effort to help unlock some extant braids and I still need to cover the footbeater construction and a wooden 'extra hands' stand too. Let's start off with move F. Move F is the reversal of move C (just don't do

Well, this is a post that I thought I wouldn't get to until I at least did the video for handlooping moves. But this has been an area of...

Well, I seem to be on a roll of posting things in reverse order as I was sure that I had already covered fingerlooping's basic moves. So yesterday I posted a re-shot video of fingerlooping's basic moves open, closed, and overtwist (linked). This is the companion blog post for those that want to freeze certain parts of the video, however, I'll only have photos of the open and closed moves. I'll have to figure out some better angles for the overtwist done in one step, in the m

In my last post I covered the color and move pattern for the double faced kikko braid in Masako’s Study of Archaic Braiding Techniques in Japan. What I’ve neglected to cover yet are the basic moves in Kute-Uchi, specifically the hand loop moves for the kikko braid. In this post I’ll cover moves A-E and in the next post cover RL-LR and LR-RL. In deciphering the oldest books on Japanese braiding, Masako rediscovered the four basic moves of kute-uchi. All other moves are based o

I'm back again. This time with something a little more advanced. A double faced kikko braid requiring four braiders. Normally I would...

"If loop braiding is so cool and faster, supposedly, than kumihimo, then why don't more people do it?" Well, that's because loop braiding...

So you want to get started braiding or have recently started and wondered how to best secure your braid without having to cut a ton of it...