Wow, it’s been a crazy couple of days for me and the lack of a post in that time reflects it. I’m sorry for not having one in my drafts for those of you that check here daily. I will try and make sure that doesn’t happen again. In the meantime, I’ve been actually work very hard those days. I was on the set of V on Wednesday and Smallville yesterday. Both days turned out to be about 14 hours and I found when I got home I ended up just flopping into bed to get some much needed sleep. The bright side is I did get some work done on the knitting front. A couple of years ago I designed and knit a sweater using an expanded Saxon braid pattern. The sleeves on the sweater were too wide and I haven’t gotten around to finishing the original project. It was completed initially, then I actually removed the sleeves, frogged the body down to the armpit, and re-knit it with a smaller neck. I frogged both sleeves and have almost re-knit one … yeah, it’s in my UFO pile right now. I’ll dig it up and put a picture in this post.
Are there 8 strands there? I wonder what that's called?
So what I did, and the point of this post, is redid the pattern during the lull on set. If I had originally wrote out everything I would have had to do this – yes Anne, I know (but I am learning). So in the end the re-design turned out to be a little trickier than I thought it would be and I had to do it a couple of times. So while doing that, I realized that there really is more than 1 way to skin a cat (does anyone know where that saying comes from?). You see, the regular Saxon braid is a 26 stitch repeat pattern that is completed over 16 rows. I have however seen it done a number of ways (3) because a Saxon braid is simply a braid done with 6 strands of yarn.This is part of the reason I was having difficulty with the 8 strand braid. If there are a number of ways to do a braid with 6 strands, there must be the same if not more to do it with 8. Anyway, at the end of the day I had recreated the 8 strand braid and am now working on decreasing the number of rows in the repeat to see if I prefer the look tighter. Here’s the lovely Louisa holding the swatch I came up with …
Doing a little research, I have found that a 5 strand braid is called a Celtic Princess braid. A seven strand braid is rarely done and I couldn’t find a name for it. I can’t seem to find a reference to the 8 strand braid so I definitely don’t what that’s called. I would appreciate it if anybody has seen it or knows what its called – just leave a comment. I’d make it a contest, but I’m sure Anne has the answer, so I’ll wait for her comment ;-). In the meantime, I’m going to write out the pattern for the braid and add it to my stitch library. I’m also going to finish the original sweater and design another one using this braid. Look for it in the future in an FO post!
The original 8 strand braid with a seed stitch 3 strand braid ...
Hugzzz 😎