Making a friendship bracelet

Awesome gift or girlfriend goodie
This tutorial will hopefully help you learn more about making kick-ass friendship bracelets. They're awesome too give away, whether it's to an old friend or a girl you're trying to woo. This particular instructable will cover a fairly advanced way of making the bracelets, but it will be possible to derive easier designs by using only a few of the steps described. Depending on what design you choose and how adapt you get at tying the bracelet, it can take as little as two hours to finish a complete bracelet. It's perfect for when you want something to do during a movie or a set of "Big Bang Theory" episodes.

The total cost of this instructable is minimal. If you need to buy the yarn it'll cost you a handful of dollars depending on the quality of the yarn. I've made several bracelets like this with spare yarn left over from other knitting projects.

Enjoy!

Step 1 Materials and preparation

Pic 1
First of all, this is all the material you'll need. A bit of yarn and a needle or something to fasten the yarn with while working. The width of the bracelet will depend on the amount of strings you decide to use for it. I'll be using four different colors of yarn, resulting in a total of eight strings that is tied together to make this particular bracelet. This will result in a bracelet that is roughly 1.5 cm / 0.5 inches wide. How wide the bracelet is varies a bit from design to design, the best way to find out how wide it'll get is actually to test it. As said above, the needle will be used to pin down the bracelet while you're working. I actually prefer using a safety pin but couldn't find one for this occasion, this ordinary pin will have to do.

Pic 2
This part of the instructable contains the potentially most important part of creating a bracelet like this. If you mess up this part, you'll have troubles along the way. Because of this, it's very important to note that the strings I've cut on this and the following picture are for illustration purposes solely. They would be far to short to make a proper bracelet.

The strings you'll be needing to make a bracelet that fits a normal wrist need to be about 2 m / 6ft 7in. If any of the strings break during the process of tying the bracelet it'll hard to finish it, it's pretty much impossible to lengthen a string when you've started. It'll only look weird. For that exact reason, make sure to check that your yarn looks good before starting, so that it won't snap while you're tying the bracelet.

Pic 3
Fold all four strings in half, they'll be tied to make a loop and also the eight strings you'll be using when tying the bracelet. Make sure that the ends are even, or else you'll be wasting string that you might need when finishing the bracelet.

Pic 4
Use all four strings to tie an overhand loop . Make sure that the loop is small and snug. If you end up doing the same design as I did for this particular bracelet you'll need to be able to put half of the strings through the loop, so it doesn't have to be big at all. Make sure to tie the loop on the middle of the four original strings, or else you'll end up with eight strings of different length.

Pic 5
Use the pin to fasten the loop before starting to work on the bracelet. I usually fasten it in my jeans, while having folded my legs on the sofa while watching the TV. It works perfectly well to attach the loop to a table or such by using tape, but I've found that this method is superior since you need to be able to keep all strings taut.

Pic 6
The last thing you'll do before actually starting to tie the bracelet is set the color order of the bracelet. For this particular design we'll pair the strings through a backslash and a forward slash to create a V-like shape. The white strings will create the first V, the red strings will pair up to make the second V etc. The strings you are currently tying with will come together in the middle, pushing all other strings outward so that you eventually cycle through them all.

Simplified design: It's very much possible to create a bracelet by only using the backslash or by only using the forward slash, that would be a simple design that anyone could cope with. If you want to do this, you should in my opinion go about the sorting a bit differently. When doing this you'll cycle from left to right or vice versa, instead of cycling from the outer edges into the middle. Because of this I'd put the strings in one of the two following orders:
1. White, red, black, beige, white, red, black, beige.
2. White, white, red, red, black, black, beige, beige.
Alternative no 1 will create a relatively wide bracelet with thin stripes. Alternative no 2 will create a bracelet with the same width but with slightly thicker stripes.


When all this is done, you're good to go.

Comments

[mastermakoko]

ROCK ON!

ive just made a leg bracelet for myself :)