Friendship Bracelets with Words!

I taught a bunch of high schoolers how to do this today - it's a bit hard to pick up, but if you are good at other friendship bracelets, you should be fine. =)

For this bracelet, you need eight strings of your letter color. These strings don’t need to be as long as normal friendship bracelet strings, but they can be if you want “just-in-case” room. You also need a suuuper long string for your background color. (I'd suggest one the length of your wingspan to start with, and then tie a new string on as needed). You may just have to tie a new one on – this string is used for most of the bracelet.

For this bracelet, instead of working in rows, you are going to use your long, background string to work back and forth. The first row, you work forward with forward knots as usual, and for the second row, you work backwards with backwards knots as usual. You work back and forth with this. You need a pattern for the words – here’s the one I like to use, from friendship-bracelets.net.

I’m going to use the letter ‘A’ as an example for this. Assume you are working forward when you reach the letter ‘A’ – You are making these side-ways, by the way. Assume your letter strings are labeled 1-8, and I am going to call the background string, ‘b’. Make one forward knot (by knot, I mean your normal two-knot thing) with b on string 1. Then, make a backwards knot with string 2 on b. Make a backwards knot with string 3 on b. Continue making backwards knots in this fashion until you reach string 7. Make a normal forward knot with string b on strings 7 and 8. Now, working backwards, make a backwards knot on string 8, with b. Make a forwards not on b with 7, make a backwards knot on 6 and 5 with b, make a forward knot with 4 on b, and make backwards knots on 3-1 with b. Now working forwards again, make forward knots on 1-3 with b, a backwards knot on b with 4, make forwards knots on 5 and 6 with b, make a backwards knot on b with 7, and make a forward knot on 8 with b. etc.

To sum it up, if you are moving forwards, to make a background color, make a forwards knot, and to make a letter color, make a backwards knot. Reverse this if you are moving backwards.

It says "MOUSE" because that's my camp name.