Yet another beginner's question. Thank you all for being so patient and
helpful with me.
Just keep asking; we all love to "strut" a bit <g>
I tried to make a braid (also called a plait, I think
Yes, it's one of those instances of confusion in terminology; both terms are used and both are correct. And you'll also encounter a similiar confusion between "braid" and "tape"
Myself, I prefer "plait" for the repeated TC done with two pairs, reserve "braid" for the *decorated* Milanese "ribbon", and keep "tape" for things like Russian and Idria... As Patty'd said: a personal quirk :)
Even if I pull it up after every CTCT, it comes back down when I work on the next one,
a) as both Alice and Patty have said, you need to tension in untwisted position, ie *TC tension* is your basic "unit" of work.
b) you *can* get away with tensioning after two stitches (TCTC, tension) if you're working with cotton or silk, but not so easily if you're working with linen (and *never* if you're working with wire. Sigh... Wire's not for the lazy people like me <g>)
c) in a plait, *both pairs are workers*. Therefore, both need to be tensioned more like workers are tensioned: slightly up and to the side (sides, in this instance). *Not* like the passives, which are tensioned downwards. The lift "locks" the stitch in position better (especially when working with fuzzy/slubby linen).
An aside: in tensioning workers in non-pliat situation, where they turn around the headside (and/or footside) pin with twists? Lift the pair towards the back and *separate* the two threads of it to "set" the twists before placing the pin. They'll resettle more evenly around the pin that way, and you won't have two separate threads before the pin and all the twists after...
when I try to pull the next one up the whole thing becomes a nasty irregular knot.
Yeah, well, by then it's "po musztardzie" (after the mustard). You *can* twiddle the tension *some* at that late date, but you have to make sure that *each thread* is tensioned "just so" and, even then, you can only "correct" the plait but so far... It's not worth the effort -- much easier to undo and redo the bit where one thread had been tensioned too much (which is what causes the knot)
Yours, free at last to try and catch up with my lace-life. The last of the -- invading -- Mohicans -- 4 of them -- left this morning, so I immediately excused myself from most of the kitchen duty, and started to make a dent in the laundry pile. DH went to the gym (as usual on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, *except* when we have visitors, so he missed a week) and on coming back, remarked: "I never realised how much of a relief it is to have a normal life back. I shouldn't say that; they're my children. Our children. Well, *my* children, but the pressure on you isn't as hard as it is on me". If he hadn't had the grace and the wit to inject a bit of irony into his tone of voice, there'd have been a murder done (and too late for this week's edition of the local paper, too <g>)...
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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