Learning the lucet!
As a lover of fiber arts, I want to try it all! Knitting, crocheting, weaving, spinning, dying, just to name a few! This includes developing even more obscure talents, like making lucet cords. What the heck is a lucet you might ask? (I did!) A lucet is a type of braiding fork that dates as far back as the viking era and produces a square cord, not completely dissimilar to its rounder cousin, the i-cord. I started off with a lovely little lucet from StichDiva.com and this youtube video.
One interesting thing about lucet making is the tension isn’t controlled by the size of one’s lucet fork. This is a lot different from a knitting or crocheting perspective, where the size of your needles or hook helps control the size of the stitches. On a lucet, it’s how hard you pull the yarn during the braiding process that makes your cord tighter or looser.
Always keeping the cord centered between the two fork prongs, you have to pull to tension after each wrap of the yarn:
And depending how hard you pull, you end up with different results:
So once you’ve made a lovely lucet cord, what do you do with it? Well, it can be all kinds of things: drawstrings, bracelets, necklaces, scarves, embroidery for costumes, a jump rope, a noose…. okay, maybe not those last two. But basically, anywhere you might use an i-cord, you can use a lucet cord as well!
Tiny Purrs 