Wednesday, December 16, 2009

"Knowing" vs. "Knowing how to"

I've been a little stuck on what to write the last couple of weeks because most of what I've been doing is crafts.  But I figure I can just as well share some "how to" posts.

Today's installment:  Finger loop braiding!

This is about the coolest, fastest braiding I've ever done (and I really did learn it in the last couple of weeks so this isn't cheating at all).  Basically, instead of holding individual thread ends and braiding, you hold loops (two threads tied together or one long actual loop) and work them two at a time by passing the loops around and through each other.  It makes the movements easy and instinctive and it goes more than twice as fast because you're working with multiple threads at each motion.

I'm still trying to get the hang of getting the final color patterns to come out right; unless I'm looking right at the diagram I can't intuit how the colors ought to go.  But there are tons of patterns and instructions at fingerloop.org and the other sites they link to.

Since I quit my job, a number of people are going to be getting handmade gifts this year, and I have a sneaking suspicion that finger loop bracelets and necklaces, or even belts, may be much in attendance.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The end of the long silence



50,165, bitch!

In all seriousness, this is the most I have ever written for a single project.  Now it's just a case of getting to the actual end of the story, since this 50,000 is only a bit more than halfway there.