By Jennie Hughes
Shabby Chick visited the Creative Stitches and Hobbycrafts Exhibition recently and saw many wonderful and lovely things. Amongst these was a cheery fellow with flashing fingers producing perfect braid with what looked like a plastic tuning fork. Don’t you find any demonstration of real skill completely irresistible? I certainly do, and so was drawn into the circle of admiring crafty-persons and thus hooked instantly.
The smiling prestidigitator was Ziggy, the man behind The Lucet the home of advanced luceting. Basically, this is an ancient craft of looping thread in a figure-of-eight pattern to produce a square braid – the lucet is the two-pronged instrument which helps you do this - and then weaving another thread (the frogging thread) through this as you loop. The frogging thread can then be pulled up to bend (frog) your braid in even coils, or you can use it to introduce beads into your braid as you work.
So, I bought the beginner’s kit (one lucet, one bobbin, a skein of yarn and the beginner’s instruction leaflet) and went home to get started.
The basic move is very straightforward, and if you’ve done knitting, crochet, macramé or any other yarn craft that involves turning loops into stitches you can do it blindfold.
That said, Ziggy’s basic leaflet didn’t answer the sort of questions I would ask if this was my first foray into this territory: Why do I get uneven patches in the braid?; Why do you say leave 30cms yarn wound round the lucet handle before you start?; What do I do with the end of the frogging cord? And so on... Questions which I realise sound completely bizarre if you haven’t tried the technique.
I practised with different weights of yarn so I could see what was happening with the stitch, and the important thing is to pull the loop tight before you turn the lucet to make the next loop. I produced a perfectly acceptable surfer-dude-type bracelet very quickly. There is also an advantage over the usual knotted (macramé) surfer bracelet in that you only have one thread left at each end, so it’s tidier to knot round the wrist.
The lucet beginner's kit costs £8.50 from Ziggy's shop.
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