I was flipping through one of my mom's innumerable archeology books and happened to notice an interesting braid in a pic of a mummy.  It was one of the pazyryk mummies, from Siberia, and the braid was, according to the caption, a kumihimo braid that the mummy was wearing as a belt.  I, being me, immediately decided that it would be great fun to make and wear a belt like the one worn by a 3000 year old mummy in Siberia, and set out to find out how to make a kumihimo braid.  And hit a brick wall.  I could find no tutorials on the internet, though there were plenty of kits and books on them.  I am wary of these because there are so many of them and I don't know which ones are "good ones".  It looks to be a decently complicated braid, so I want to make sure whatever I get is good.  So, my questions to all are:
1) Does anyone know how to do this braid?
2) Does anyone know of any good tutorials on the internet?
3) Can anyone recommend a good book/kit?

Thanks for the help,
Eo

maybe this can help


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RNbFjvZycs

*facepalm*  How could I forget to check you tube?
A lot easier than it looked at first...

Suppose that pretty much sums it up... is doing a 12 and 16 strand the same pattern?

You might look here and other places for marudai <+++ A braiding stand helps (a lot)
http://www.ee0r.com/kumihimo/

here is a 16 strand
http://www.vvprints.com/vvp/braids.html

And from a past moderator
http://knopen.ismijnhobby.nl/tables/braid-disk_table.html
7 & 11 strand braid up fastest

Good hunting.

When we are already discussing 16-strand braids....is there a basic difference between the Kumihimo braids and the Peruvian braid discussed in this thread, or is the difference just that one is made on a marudai and one is done in-hand.   http://slinging.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1268777718/0#0
I do the Peruvian one all the time now, and will not buy or make a Marudai unless I feel that I must ;)
Maybe I can get more patterns with it, but I seem to remember seeing Peruvian braids with more patterns, too.

Darn, I can remember a time not so long ago when I thought I would never waste time on such complicated braids :D
timann

timann wrote on Jun 1^st, 2010 at 11:37am:

one is made on a marudai and one is done in-hand.   http://slinging.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1268777718/0#0

I couldn't get the one in my hand to work right, but I got the one on the Marudi to work really fast.  I see how it works now though, so I bet I could do it without the disk now...

... the one that I am trying to make has 5 colors expressed equally, so 10 strands?  Can you do one with 10 strands?  All the ones I've seen are multiples of four, would you have to up it to 20?

http://books.google.com/books?id=xH1agYR4w40C&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=Cherchen+man's+belt&source=bl&ots=hyZl8_mQu7&sig=0_mN63FdVgQ9rZkL7hC6xyEndz8&hl=en&ei=TEQFTObWDqK0MNHV7Ts&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Cherchen%20man's%20belt&f=false
The picture is page 64 in this book

Eo, I did a quick test of the in-hand braid, and could not make it work with neither 10 or 20 strands.  It seems to work on 4 - 8 - 16 and 24 strands.  
timann

Here are nice instructions for a 12 strand braid.  Tony
http://www.draconia.pl/index.php?strona=sznurek_okragly&ver=eng

Eoraptor,
 With a slightly different technique you can do a 10 stand braid using the braiding disk.  Tony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9sNvimzMx4&feature=player_embedded[/url]

The Peruvian method pretty much demands multiples of four, assuming that there isn't also a core of threads hiding inside to do interchanges with. They can all be reproduced a great deal faster on a maru-dai. Kava produced quite a number of these, I think.

Barber says she needed 24 threads in 5 colors to reproduce the belt if I read it correctly. It seems from the text that she took some time to find the method, so maybe there is some trick to it. The details may have appeared somewhere in the academic literature, but I've not found it.

Timann, there are plenty more Peruvian braids out there, definitely no need to rush to the maru-dai ;).