Fingerloop Braiding Class

So this weekend at Border Skirmish, I gave a class on beginning fingerloop braiding.  Until now, all of the classes that I've given have been more lecture-style - that is, I stand up and give information about children's garb, or pavilion making, or whatever, using a Power Point presentation or handouts for pictures.  But for Border Skirmish, I decided that something a little more hands-on would be good.  I really enjoyed learning fingerloop braiding at Pennsic last year, and figured it'd be something that people would be be curious about and be interested in learning.  So, I put together a handout and pulled together a class.

Considering that the event had lots of outdoors stuff going on, and it was absolutely beautiful outside, there were few people coming in for classes and shopping.  So I was pretty pleased by the fact that I got three people at my class, a couple more asking for my handouts but who couldn't stay, and several more who I taught afterwards.  One of the women said she had been taught before, but never really quite "got it".  But after my class, she felt really comfortable with it.  I think it helped that I did a couple things that I had noticed as being kindof vague in the class that I took.  I started them off with pre-cut and pre-tied loops, so that we didn't have to spend ten minutes with everyone cutting, folding and tying their bowes.  Then, I had them take a single bowe and pass it from hand to hand, learning the difference between unreversed and reversed.  Then, we started with a 3-loop braid, rather than one of the more complex ones.  The class that I took at Pennsic jumped right in with an 8-loop spiral braid, which is much more complicated.  The 3-loop let the students feel comfortable with passing from one hand to another, through another loop, and get the feel of pulling the string through reversed.  Then, it was an easy jump to a 5-loop purse-string braid, and they could see themselves moving onto more complex ones by reading the directions.

So, I will definitely plan on giving this class again.  I'm going to convert it to HTML and put it up on my website.  Hopefully others will find it helpful, too.