I'm back again. This time with something a little more advanced. A double faced kikko braid requiring four braiders. Normally I would save this for later but another braider reached out to me about the setup and moves for the double faced kikko braid in Masako's book, Study of Archaic Braiding Techniques in Japan. The individual moves are fairly basic for hand loop braiding, the difficulty is finding four braiders to work together. Or build a custom multi-braider 'extra hands' platform.
So this is what I have so far but hopefully a few leads will help translate the relevant pages and I can narrow down more details. The move pattern is a bit different than the one Masako describes on her single faced kikko handout, http://www.lmbric.net/n7/ILn7/ILn7.html, and the instructions are a bit unclear (pending translations, but I suspect 3 or 4 times) on how many times the cycle is repeated. For the color pattern, I've assigned the colors used in Masako's book to numbers so that the pattern can be made to any color scheme.
This particular double faced kikko braid is an interchanging pattern, in that the bottom color pattern swap places with the top color pattern. The move pattern consists of two halves each half having 8 move sets, the first half cycling a set number of times followed by the second half cycling for a number of times. Then its repeat that super-cycle until complete.
Move Set 1 AL RL--LR AR Repeat Move Sets1-4
Move Set 2 AR AL
Move Set 3 RL--LR LR--RL
Move Set 5 EL RL--LR ER DL RL--LR DR
Move Set 6 CR CL DR DL
Move Set 7 RL--LR LR--RL RL--LR LR--RL
Move Set 8 CR CL CR CL DR DL DR DL
For the color pattern in this double faced kikko, there are six different colors: Pink (1), Orange Brown (2), White (3), Green (4), Dark/Black Green (5), and Orange/Light Orange Brown (6). Now if you wanted only one color braid you could just make the loops a single color. If you wanted to make the white/orange color thicker change all the 1&4's to 3&6'. Alternately if you wanted to keep them thin just change the 1&4's to 2&5'.
Left Hand Right Hand
Braider #1
Upper Shank 122123232 232323133
Lower Shank 455456565 565656466
Braider #2
Upper Shank 122222212 333132323
Lower Shank 455555545 666465656
Braider #3
Upper Shank 323231333 666465656
Lower Shank 656564666 545555554
Braider #4
Upper Shank 331323232 232321221
Lower Shank 664656565 565654554
And I've just now realized that I haven't made a post describing any of the moves. I'll work on a post for that, in the mean time here is Masako's handout of the hand looping moves, http://www.lmbric.net/ILh/ILh.html. You'll note that Move E is not listed on that page so I've attached an image of it from Masako's Study of Archaic Braiding Techniques in Japan.
