| How to Make the Chinese Staircase Bracelet Oct 15th 2012, 03:00 Want to make a gift for your friends? Give them a Chinese Staircase friendship bracelet and tell them you made it! Here's how to get started. - Choose your thread. You can use embroidery floss, plain yarn, or any other medium-to-thick string. You'll need three strands. (But once you know how to do this you can use more than three.) Contrasting colors––such as red, white and blue, or green, pink and white––will show off the intricacy of the bracelet better.
- Cut your thread. Cut a little more than you need rather than too little; remember that you can always cut more thread off if you need to. Wrap the thread about three to four times around your wrist or ankle. This should give you a pretty close guess of how much thread you'll need. If your friend's wrists or ankles are bigger or smaller than yours, adjust accordingly.
- Start your bracelet. Double-knot the three strings together at one side, so they stay together. This will be the first knot of your bracelet.
- Stabilize your bracelet. As you tie the bracelet, you'll need the end to be tied down somehow so that your knots maintain consistent tension. You can tape the knotted end onto the edge of a table, counter, leg or to a chair. You could also clip it to a clipboard. Or, use a safety pin and attach it to a small pillow, or to the knee of your jeans; or make a loop with the string and put it around your toe. You may also let another person hold the end for you.
- Loop the first color. Hold two strings in one hand and the other string in the other hand. Cross the one string over and under the two. (It might look something like a '4' shape.)
- Pull the thread through the loop. Take the tail, or end, of the '4' by putting your hand in the wide space of the '4' and pull the tail. As you tie the knot, pull the two strings in one hand horizontally, or parallel to your leg or the table. Pull the string with which you tied the knot vertically, or perpendicular to your leg or the table. The knot will rise to the top, next to the first knot that you tied.
- Keep tying. Repeat the loop and the pull-through 10 to 15 times, then switch colors. You don't have to switch, but if you decide not to, make sure the one color you want to use is longer than the others. As you stitch down the bracelet make sure that the pattern is curving nicely and looks like a spiral staircase.
- Stop when the bracelet fits. When the bracelet can fit around your wrist or ankle loosely, so you can take it off and put on, stop tying.
- Finish off. Tie the tail in a double knot, and tie the two ends of the bracelet together.
- You can use more than three strings.
- If one knot overlaps another, carefully take a needle and put it underneath the overlapped loop and try to undo it.
- Knot the strings tight or else they'll stretch apart if you happen to accidentally pull them.
Edit Warnings - Sometimes you may get messy or bad knots in the string. When this happens, don't tug on the string. That will make the knot worse.
Edit Things You'll Need - 3 or more-colored strands of embroidery floss (about 10 yards lengths long); thin or regular yarn also works, but embroidery floss works best
- Tape, safety pin, or clipboard
Edit Related wikiHows |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment