All the kumihimo

—

by

Liz

Yesterday I spent the whole day playing with basic kumihimo.

I spurred myself on wanting to see how each thread/yarn I had would look once braided up. Because I kept to only bracelet lengths, I was able to churn through quite a few.

Of course, first I jumped into some more Cottage Garden Threads.

Cottage Garden Threads Passion Flower
Cottage Garden Threads Pocketful

But I quickly visited some other favourites with Three Trees Fibre Crafts at the top of that list. Three Trees has hand-dyed sock yarn and I also tried one of their Siren Singles. This one is a favourite – Pink Coral.

Three Trees Fibre Crafts Siren Singles - Pink Coral

This one is from their Fledgling 4ply Sock – Summer Sunset.

Three Trees Fibre Crafts - Fledgling 4ply sock - summer sunset

I was also eager to try the amazing Maximoo yarn. I only have leftovers from one of their skeins as I need to work up the others into crochet projects first, but ‘Rust Bucket’ is amazing.

Maximoo Luxury Sock - Rust Bucket

Then I cracked open my stash and dragged out a Hedgehog Fibres mini and played with that.

Hedgehog fibres sock mini - Insomnia

And lastly I played with some DMC 5 Perle Cotton – variegated. These were a Yellow – Pink (4100) and a Yellow – White (4077).

DMC 4100 and 4077 Perle 5 Cotton

Let’s just say that by the end of the day I had a few extra aches and pains from all this handiwork 🙂

A few days ago I also completed my third kumihimo bracelet in this series (Waterlily Diamonds bracelets). This time I used Jokamamo Textiles lovely sock yarn – Raspberry Sherbet.

Jokamamo Textiles Fingering sock - Raspberry Sherbet

Here is a closeup of that lovely speckle.

Jokamamo Platinum sock - Raspbery Sherbet.

Kumihimo notes

  • To get enough kumihimo braid to make a bracelet length, you need eight strands at 50-55cm. Fifty is the minimum, but I like to add a little extra to compensate for the thread lost in the beginning and end knots and the width of the kumihimo disk.
  • Use the smaller kumihimo disk. Because of the shorter length of the threads (Cottage Garden Threads six-strand hand-dyed cottons come in 50cm pre-cut lengths), you are going to lose some thread to the width of the kumihimo disk – use a smaller disk.
  • These are all eight strand kumihimo braids to arrive at a specific width and length for the pattern I’m using for the bracelets. The width of the braid affects the size of the beaded beads. Too think and the beads need to be redesigned. Too thin and the beads lack support. At some point I will write up the whole bracelet pattern.
  • Here is an older short of mine showing the braiding process. I will film a more decent tutorial sometime in the future 🙂

Best wishes,
Liz
(off the edge, but learning to fly)