How to Make a Kumihimo Bracelet, Easy Japanese Braiding for Beginners

Hello I'm Crafty Patty and thanks for joining me today. If you have been following me you know that I have been making lots of this wonderful Kumihimo fabric art tutorials. I've got lots of them on my channel so if this interests you by all means have a look at that. But that has led me to want to try doing this kumi, now I have to say it right, kumihimo braided bracelet. Now this technique is not new at all it's been around for oh at least a thousand years and they the Japanese have been using it for many different types of braiding for different uses but now they've made it easy for us to have portable supplies so anybody around the world can make make them, including me and you. So we're gonna make this basic kumihimo bracelet together. As always I'll have the full supply list in the description box below this video along with links but I'll also explain the supplies as we go. So come along with me and let's make this kumi. I'm getting used to saying this okay. Try to say it five times fast. Let's make a kumi hemo bracelet together. Here we go let's get started. Here's some ideas of some different cords you can try. And here's a pack of nine little skeins that I picked up from Dollarama. That's a great place to start if you want to practice. You can use hemp cord, embroidery cord, or a satin polyester cord like this. This of course will work up faster if it is thicker. And of course the main item The next item that you're going to need is your kumihimo round disc to apply your cords. Now, optional items, as you can see, I've got this weight hanging down from the bottom. The reason we've got this is it creates wonderful tension. Just like knitting or crochet, if you don't have proper tension, you're going to have uneven design. And that's what it looks like with the weight. You can also see I've got some bobbins on right here. And of course, a pair of scissors to cut your cord. Now, depending on who you're making this bracelet for or whether you're making a necklace. So let's say we're making a bracelet for me. I'm measuring, there's my zero there. So I'm at approximately six and a quarter inches. So once we've got our measurement, we take that measurement and we times it by three as a general rule. If you're a little bit concerned that you're going to run out, you times it by four. And just for safe measure, I've decided to times it by four, so I'm up to 28 inches. So I'll just place my next one next to that one, use that for my measuring, and I need four of each color. So I'll continue cutting all my strands, and then we'll get back to you. I now have four of each of my four colors cut at 28 inches. So let's just gather those up, and we're going to be tying those all in a knot. Now you can even up all of these ends if it's bothering you, but this end is going to get cleaned up anyways, so it's not really that important as long as you've got all your cords together. And all we're going to do now is just tie a simple knot. So just around, poke it up through the loop. And I would suggest leaving about a four inch tail, about that much. That should be enough for tying off your ends. And now we're ready to place our cords on our disc. Now looking at your Kumihimo disc, you'll see there's some arrows on mine. Some of them don't have the arrows. That's just telling you that they like to work in a counterclockwise fashion. You can also see numbers. So we're going to use the numbers just for your sake for easier placement of of the chords. So all we're going to do now is place our prepared cords down through that hole and then I'm just going to use my two fingers on the back side to hold them in place. So our first two cords, or let's say our first four cords, are going to be blue. So let's find our four blue cords and we're going to pull those ones out. Let's pop them over to the side here. Let's come up here to where 32 is just so it's easier so I can explain where I'm putting the cords. So I'm going to put the first cord on the left side of that number 32, and the next cord on the right side of that number 32. Now let's go to number 4, and we're going to put one on the left of number 4, and one on the right of number 4. Now you can see my cords are just a little twisted, so I'm going to just take that one and put it over there, and just move it around, and that's just a little cleaner down in the bottom there. It's not real crucial, but it's nicer to keep it clean. And the next color is going to be white, and I've just pulled out my four whites. Pop those over there. Let's bring the first one to the left of number eight, and another one to the right side of number eight. And again, left of number 12, right of number 12. Next, find your four grays, and let's put one on the left side of number 16, on the right side of number 16, and then one on the left side of 20. And one on the right side of 20. I'm going to go on each side of 24 and each side of 28. So now I'm just going to go back in here, make sure I'm holding down. I'm going to make sure that my cords are sitting in the middle of my hole. So you can see here that these are nice and taut. So I'm just going to tighten up on these ones, the blue ones and the white ones. So it's sitting pretty much in the middle. It just makes for easier braiding. That's looking pretty good. Now this is where the weight really comes in handy. So I'm going to come into the bottom here and I'm just going to clip that weight onto the knot. That's going to hang down the center and it's going to keep all the cords at the same tension, which is perfect to get a really beautiful even braid. Now every group of two cords has a pair of matching twos right across from it. So these ones doesn't have to be the same color but they're across from each other. So that's how we're going to work with our braiding. So let's go up because we started at 32, just so I can make it easier for you. We're going to always start on the right side. We're going to take that one out of 32. We're going to come back down here with our matching pairs. We're going to put it on the right side into number 15. So now you see we've got one strand, we've got three strands. So we need to even that up. So we're going to take the left strand that comes out and we're going to bring it to the left side. of the blue strand. Now we have two and two again. Now we're going to follow our arrows and we're going to turn counterclockwise. We've just done this one and now let's do the next one. Same thing. We're going to take our top right, move it down to bottom right. We're going to take our bottom left, move it up to top left. And that is how you do every one of these over again for each round I'm going to go around in each. Again, top to bottom, we've got our three, so we need to take the bottom one, bottom left, and move it up, left of the seven. Getting it? Let's take our 12 out, move it down to our matching pair on the bottom. There's our three, and move it. I'm going to tell you this right away if you get distracted or you don't know where you're at. This is our next one here. We're going to bring it down to the right side. Now we have three chords here, one chord here. So let's say we just forgot where we were, we've moved our hands, and it's gone, we've got to answer the phone, whatever. We come back and thought, oh, where am I? Well, you know, because you've got three chords here, and you've only got one chord there. So you know you've got to bring this chord up to the top to the left. And now you're back in action again. Now, you see my strands down here? Once in a while you've got to just kind of open them up and try to get the knots out and even though there's not many not much length down here I find that is time consuming so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add those bobbins and you can see just how much easier it is. I have found when I open up my bobbin and place the string right in there and wrap it around I have no problem There's no problem with it staying in place. So I wrap it around until I'm about, say, three inches away from my disc. And then you just close it up. It keeps the cording in nice and tight. And every time you want just a little bit more cording, as you can see, you just simply click this, pull it out, and you're ready to go. So I will carry on and add the rest of my bobbins, and then I'll come back to you. And here we have our disc, and we have all our bobbins attached. And it looks like this would create more entangle, but it doesn't. Now, as you can see, I forgot to do what I should have done and bring my third one down so I know exactly where I'm starting. If that happens to you, let's do a check here. You go around, you can see that this is under, that's under, this one's over, under, under, under, and over. So these ones that are over, you can see that one's pulled down here, and this one is pulled over there. So I know I've done those ones, so I know my next one is this one. Okay, so let's give this a try with our bobbins. So it's right there, it's already Already entangled. And we're back. No untangling. And I think you're going to find that it goes way faster. Especially when you're working with a finer cord that takes a bit longer. And if you do get a tangle, you just push it like that, and it untangles. What do you think? I like it way better. See? Just move it, it's untangled. Otherwise, every so often, you're going to have to, like, get underneath there and untangle all of those mini cords. So, that's pretty much all there is to it. Follow the same pattern, moving one down. See, just give it a kick, bring up the next one. So I think I will keep going until I've got the length I need, and then I'll show you what we do to finish it off, because this will be like watching dry paint, watching me do this. It's very relaxing, though. You want to do this while watching TV or something. And once you get in a rhythm, it's pretty easy. As you can see, there's not much to it. Just making sure you remember you've got your pairs. That's what you're working with. One down, one up, and keep going. Once you've got your braid the length you want, then you can just remove all your bobbins and look at your wonderful artwork. And now it's just a matter of lifting off all of our cords through the hole. And just for now, until we get to that stage, I'm just going to tie this off in a knot until we get to that That part where I'm going to show you how we finish off our ends. But you can see, The beautiful pattern it made, what I call kind of like a broken spiral, where you can see the white going up, but you've got a little titch of green in there, and on the gray you've got a little titch of blue in there, but all going up in a spiral. So you need to decide how big you want your bracelet. I don't want mine to be tight against my wrist, but I want a little tiny bit of a give. So I'm just about right there for where I want to tie it off. So this is what we're going So I'm looking to where my braid is nice and tight and it's a little bit loose right there. So I'm going to tie it off right where I want to keep that final part of that really good nice tight braid. So let's bring it back down to about there. That looks pretty good right there. I'm going to tie a really tight knot. Let's go around the back side, bring it up again, and let's tie that off one more time. Nice and tight, really tight. Since we don't want to lose that beautiful braid and I'm going to do the same for the other side. Now I'm going to undo my knot and I'm just going to unravel that braiding up to my knot that I just tied. I'll get my next portion of how I'm going to tie this off so it's right up to my braid. It's pretty good and the same for the other side. So I have these jewelry findings and So this particular little kit. four different sizes which is great depending on your thickness of cord so that gives you some flexibility obviously it won't be the little tiny one here now before i cut my end totally off i'm going to come in with some super glue uh i'm not going to try to pronounce that name but i believe it's super glue but they're calling it bracelet glue and this one does come with this nice little It's a little long. Tiny, tiny spot at the end, so it's easy to get glue into where you want to put it. And as you can see, it's this little tiny nozzle. It's nice and easy to be accurate. If you've never worked with super glue before, you get your finger on there, it's going to stick. I'm just sitting on a piece of parchment paper right here, so it doesn't stick to the parchment. I'll do the other end as well. And now that I've put some glue on there, I feel confident I can cut that down fairly close to where I've got my tie off. I'm just doing a little test in this finding here with the corn end. The cord end looks like it's going to be a nice fit. I'm going to put a little bit of glue inside here. Not too much because you don't want it overflowing. The beauty of this little long nozzle, I can actually see it coming down. And without waiting too long, because this is super glue, get some on this one as well. Put that together. Don't wait too long. Push it up inside. Give it a good push like this and hold for a bit. Give it a bit of a twist, pops in, squish it in. It's easy if you have two pliers. It's not like I'm pulling out this way. You just want to move it side to side, holding on one, pushing back with the other until it's open like so. Now we need to put it into our end cap and then get your lobster claw and get that in there too. Like so and then holding on we're going to move it back together so the jump ring closes up to match up like it was originally and sometimes you can hear a little bit of a click but I think we've got it closed up again. Now we need to open up another jump ring for the other side of our bracelet Let's pop on another one. And then into our... Cord ending and we can close this one up. Now right now that would be a tight fit with one jump ring. I'm going to add two more jump rings so I've got a little bit of an extender. That was the second one I put on so I need to open up a bit more so I can get another one on. Close that one up. I end up adding one, two, three, four jump rings on this side and one jump ring on that side and that makes a beautiful closure. for your bracelet and depending on how big or how small you want it you can adjust it to fit whoever you're giving it to but I like it to not fall down too far so this is perfect for me and you could also just push it up if you wanted to have it sit tighter Here you go. First beginner Pumihimo. And it's amazing how dense and how thick that braid is. It's solid. It's really cool. I really like it. Of course, these are some of my favorite colors. Those are the colors I chose, but you can use any colors you want. Well, what do you think? Not sure if you're following along with me or you're excited to go out and buy some supplies so you can make some of these beautiful bracelets. These make wonderful gifts as well, of course. And I was hoping. to create a glamour glittery shiny maybe red and silver red and gold or something like that for the christmas season which would make wonderful gifts as well as for yourself for any functions that you want to go to now i haven't got my supplies yet so i can't promise the video but i'm hoping for so turn on your notification bells and Then you won't miss the next video in case I can do that next glittery bracelet, which I'm hoping to do. But until then, I've got a ton of other videos you can watch. As you know, I've got lots of videos on my channel. Until next time, bye-bye, see ya!