Going with the Flow – An Inspired Friendship Bracelet

A special thanks to Rainbow Haze Shop for the inspiration of this bracelet. Inspiration can come from anywhere and for me at any time. In this video, I show from what inspired, what didn’t work as I wanted, and what helped to keep me on track.

So the other morning I woke up and after having thought about having seen this on Instagram…

I was thinking these patterns are really cool but what if I tweaked it just a little bit. So I gave it a shot and it did okay, although basically this didn’t quite turn out how I was imagining it. In fact you can barely even notice there’s something going on there. Unless you’re really an experienced bracelet maker, you might not even notice those little curves that are off into the corners there.

So I got this idea that all right, let’s try it again but we will use more strings, make it thin and well do just whatever to get the effect I was imagining. So I dove in and made this one. There are 12 strands there, 24 after the loop. After I was kind of in the process of making it, I realized that this would have made a really, really good tutorial. I felt like there were certain things even in the process of making this that seemed like people could benefit from, so here we are today and I’m gonna show you how I made this by making one more.

I needed three colors and an additional nine more of one color. Each of these is one-third of a skein so it’s longer than two meters each. So if you take a skein (eight meters) and you cut it into three equal pieces, that is the length that these are. That’s pretty much exactly what you need if you’re going to try to copy this just the same as I made it because I’m really down to very short ends by the time I get to the end of this. Also, those plastic totes are full of pre-cut strands. Basically it helps because I don’t have to worry about untangling a skein and cutting it, or questioning if I have the right numbers when I have a creative idea and I’m ready to go for it!

I am going to basically trade one color from the right-hand side with one color from the left-hand side, so in this case, I shifted the red off to the left and the orange off to the right, which will leave the yellow for both sides. The only colors in this whole thing are red, yellow, and orange. I wanted it to be kind of a bright, happy, sunshiny kind of thing to make for a nice contrast against this sort of a beige color.

To give it the big zigzag effect, I am going to wrap the beige around the remaining strands as I work down. The orange is going to come in at the end, except for the one beige at the very end. So basically there’ll be nine on either side of this loop. There are eight of the beige, then the orange, then the yellow, and the orange, and then one beige. The single beige is what will run between the other set of colors and it moves on to the left helping to give that Celtic look that was present in that inspiration I showed you from Rainbow Haze Shop.

From the left side, I start with one beige, the red, yellow, and the other red. The knots in the rows stop before the orange to let them go over the reds.

Now at this point, I’m at a loss for words to explain what happens next. So I’m going to refer you to this point in the video. Even if you can’t understand what I’m saying, what I’m doing should be clear to see. That corner took until about 15:49 in the video.

So here once that bend in the corner was made, I clipped the last strand to the board to help keep the knots consistent.

At this point, I think you should have the gist of how this is working. Watch the video closely to see how this particular pattern plays out, or simply use your own pattern. This next bit shows how I made the other side of the curve.

So there you go. And here’s an image you can study if that helps you to figure this out.

And if you were interested in how I set up the kumi, here is an image of that.

If you have any questions, just drop ’em in the comments!