The art of “kumihimo”, a fund-raising idea for Asexual Awareness Week

Details: Category: Entertainment; Published on Thursday, 27 October 2011 15:05; Written by MugenPuchiHime; Hits: 672

(Author's Note. This article was planned to be published on the Arts Engine for AAW'11, but an unexpected ciumstance intervened.)

This author recently found an interesting crafting hobby from the catalogue pages of Nordic Needle.

Kumihimo is the ancient Japanese art of weaving silk threads into decorative cord-like ropes. These ropes can then be used as belts, necklaces, bracelets, etc.

The modern kumihimo weaving loom is a foam cut into a circular shape. It has slots to place the threads you are using. The number of threads, their thickness,and their positions at the start of weaving also impacts the end results of your kumihimo (besides the weaving method). Most kumihimo projects use embroidery threads.

If you are already a kumihimo fan, there is a website which generates weaving patterns on a WYSIWYG flash interface software.

Here is an example of a kumihimo pattern (on a 32 slot wheel) which contains diagonal stripe colors of the Asexuality flag.

BLACK: 8; 9; 24; 25.

GREY: 12; 13; 28, 29.

WHITE: 1; 16; 17; 32.

PURPLE: 4; 5; 20; 21.