Our Creative Space; Wire Weaving Tutorial

We want to share with you what we learn on our lessons. The Trabzon work is really hard and it will take a while till we have something to show here. But we are learning other cool techniques too.

This is one of the many types of braiding, done with the help of a small vice.

You put any even number of wires in the vice, depending on how wide you want your braid to be. In this case I used 10 wires. Divide the wires alternating up and down, here you see 5 wires bent up and 5 wires bent down.

Take the wire that is most  left and under, bring it across all the way to the right pulling with all your might and fasten it at the right side in the vice.

Then take the first wire from the upper left side with your left hand and the first wire of the down side with your right hand, and cross them, inverting their positions.

Like this.

Do the same thing with the second, third and forth pair of wires.

Remove the wire that you had fixed previously in the vice and cross it with the last remaining wire.

One goes up and one goes down.

Now all ten wires have changed position.

Pull outwards as hard as you can to smooth the wires

Open the vice slightly, push with your thumb till the wires are again flush with the jaws of the vice, and tighten again.
You have to do this after every row, but don't remove the braid off the vice till you are done.
This loosening and tightening again of the vice is tedious and time consuming, but you need to do it, in order to get a flat and even braid.

And than you start the following row by putting the utmost left-down wire across and fixing it in the vice.

This is the result. There is lot of room for improvement, my braid is by far not tight enough. It is really hard on the fingers!

Despite all the imperfections, Estella succeeded in making really cool stuff with my little braid!