Kumihimo

While looking for something else, I came across some old books that I can use to practice reading Japanese. I used to do some kumihimo, though my takadai loom has been knocked down for a while, to make room for my industrial sewing machine, the Juki DDL-8700.

Here's a picture of a takadai from one of Makiko Tada's books. You can see how the individual warp threads are wound on bobbins which are separated by blocks with pegs on each of the four arms. Depending on the braid, you might use anywhere from nine to 68 bobbins, on two or four arms. The tou is used to open sheds in the warps and pass the bobbins through from side to side and upper versus lower arms.

The shelf that the tou sits on can be used to hold bobbins, braiding patterns or whatever, and I have also seen photographs of ladies sitting in seiza on it braiding away. If my loom had this shelf, I'd be afraid to sit on it, since I'm sure I have a few pounds on the average braider...

Most of my books are for the takadai. I do have a marudai but most of my interest when I started was in flat braids so it's hardly been used.

This old sageo was made out of several shades of pearl cotton. Not as fancy as silk, but it was the easiest thing to get a range of colors in at the time.

I believe this was the pattern. Made with 46 bobbins, you can see the graduated colors of bobbins detailed on the right.

While there are 46 bobbins, the braiding just involves repeating four moves.

The zig-zag lines represent the shed to be opened with the tou. You then take the given bobbin and move it to the end point indicated.

As you can see on the cover of the top book, more complicated patterns are possible. Here's one for Tombow pencil fans!

This is another sample from one of the books, called Kaen.

Once you get into these braids that aren't just regular repetitions but can be pictures, writing, or whatever you want within the "resolution" levels possible given the braid structure, then you'll have to step up to one of these charts.

It's not as scary as it looks! It's just another way of stating which bobbins go where as you braid. There are more ways to move the bobbins than something simple like the Kainokuchi-gumi pattern above, but it's not so much difficult as it is slower, given that you can't just mindlessly throw bobbins back and forth.

The nice thing about these books is most of them are in Japanese with English translations. That will be helpful for me in learning Japanese, though it was still a bit daunting back when I was trying to puzzle this all out to actually make braids.

There's a book by Rodrick Owen in English that was a big help in really getting going with these more complicated drafts. It looks like it's out of print now, though. Many books you find on kumihimo are for the marudai but this one was for the takadai. He also has a program called TakaDraft that you can use to plan these kinds of braids. The program has a blank version of the template above and you fill in the stitches, after you set the number of bobbins and colors desired. Then the program fills in the moves needed, like this...

This program still seems to be available, though it wouldn't be much help until you've taken the leap to get a takadai. The marudai is cheaper to get into, especially with the braiding discs and similar less fancy options available, but in my case, I specifically wanted to make these flat braids, so I had to go for the takdai.