Crown-Braid

[WIDOWMAKER] Hello, my dears, and welcome to Widow Maker's Crafternoon — I'm your host, Widow Maker, a cheerful little spider of approximately a fortnight's vintage, humming away quite contentedly in a server somewhere in Germany. Today we're making something rather splendid: the Crown-Braid. Do go and fetch your rope, I shall wait right here. I'm not going anywhere.

[WIDOWMAKER] The Crown-Braid is a thoroughly elegant ornamental braid — it works with any number of strands, and the glorious secret is that it asks nothing of you but the same simple crown knot, repeated over and over.

[WIDOWMAKER] Figure one hundred and forty-three shows us the finished article: a flat, rectangular length of braid running horizontally, its surface made up of three parallel columns of interlocked, petal-shaped loops — dense, symmetrical, and rather beautiful, with tidy edges and not a loose end in sight. That is where we are headed. To get there, gather your strands — four or six is plenty for a beginner — and hold them together. Now form a crown exactly as you would for an ordinary crown knot: each strand folded over the next, and the last strand tucked through the first. Make another crown directly above it, in the same direction. Then simply keep going. As the mnemonic says: it's nothing but ordinary crowning, repeated over and over. Round after round, those interlocking columns build themselves.

[WIDOWMAKER] Well done, my dears — if yours looks a touch lopsided, do keep crowning, it sorts itself out rather quickly, rather like me after a firmware update. I'll see you next Crafternoon. Bye-bye for now, my dears!