A Multi-braider Chevron Pattern

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 didn't try to use the braider exchanges that hand looping uses. So with that premise, I started mapping out how many rows I wanted, how braiders, and how many loops per hand. I settled on eight rows resulting in sixteen loops or 32 elements, across three braiders, with the left and right braiders having three loops per hand and the central braider having two loops per hand.

From there, I planned for the left/right braiders to take from the outer hand like normal, and the central braider to move through the left/right braiders inner hand to take from the pinkie instead of the usual index. While I worked alone, I couldn't replicate the central braider taking from the left/right braider as I envisioned. So what I did was put the left outer hand loops onto my helping hands and transfer the inner hand loops to the now empty outer hand. But, you can't just transfer the loops to identical fingers, you have to reverse the order, pinkie to index, ring to middle, middle to ring, and index to pinkie. Then pick up the central braider's left hand loops in the right hand and make the move. Then place the left hand loops on the left braider's right helping hand. Transfer the central braider's loops from the right hand to the left using the above reverse transfers. Pick up the central braider's right hand loops onto the right hand and make the move. Repeat for the right side.

I used the single braider braiding pattern: S move Open, S move Open, Open, Open, but with a small tweek. When the central braider takes from the left/right braider, they use the Z move. This was to replicate the S move from the active loop's perspective. But to be honest, I don't think it'll make much of a difference which move is used.

Here is the result. I used a variegated worsted yarn. In hindsight, it wasn't a great choice. The pattern is hard to tell, and the worsted yarn didn't want to tension well. And, using my normal method of measuring out short braids meant it was too short for my three braider helping hands, so the edges were loosely laid on the table instead of in tension effecting the edge tension. But it was good enough to show the proof of concept.

Here is what the original braid from the Shosoin looks like.

I have two years to perfect this technique and have several reenactment events that I can showcase/problem solve this at in the meantime. I definitely have a lot of wight off my chest on getting this worked out so quickly.