Denture Garland[]
It looks kind of like a set of teeth and the fishing line I used to buildit feels like dental floss!
All it takes is diamond braid clothes line, hot glue, fishing line, and a tapestry needle. It's pretty easy to make, functions very well, and opens up some interesting design possibilities.
MATERIALS
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Diamond braid utility cord. I used 15 lb. SecureLine diamond braid clothes line.
Fishing line. The heavier the better. A certain amount of stiffness is desirable. I used Cabela's 50 lb. dacron line. Braid lines would work too. Monofilament would create problems, I'm sure.
TOOLS
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Hot glue gun with glue.
Nail clippers. (This fishing line is tough to cut with scissors!)
Tapestry needle
Fabric marking pen (or other non-permanent marker)
PREPARE THE CORD
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I tend to torture my diamond braid cord before building something with it. You have to remove its plastic core. This cord has also been boiled, harshly bleached, and abraded. As you abrade it by pulling its length across a sharp edge of some sort, note the pattern of the braid and establish a top and a bottom side. This stuff behaves much more nicely in a garland if each loop has a top and a bottom. After abrading, wash and rinse thoroughly or else the glue won't stick well to the broken cotton fibers.
All this treatment will cause you to lose a little more than an inch in each piece due to fraying of the ends. Little if any length is lost due to boiling, bleaching and washing, if it's also well abraded. A half inch is lost in gluing the cord's ends. So if your goal is 4" loop tops, cut your pieces to 14" (4x3 = 12; + 2 lost = 14)
Trim the cords to removed the frayed ends and make them all reasonable even in length.
Make an even number of loops. This garland has a left and a right half.
MAKE THE LOOPS
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You might want to practice on some scraps of cord before workking with the prepared lengths. It takes a little finesse to make a nice connection. Plus, be prepared to feel a little heat and get a couple fingers horribly and irritatingly sticky!
Put a short bead of hot glue along one of a cord's ends. Keeping the cord's braid straight, glue it to the opposite end, overlapping for the length of the bead only. You shouldn't need to apply so much pressure that the glue comes squeezing out.
Be sure to keep the cord's top facing out and its bottom facing in (or vice versa). We do NOT want Mobius Strips!
Apply a very thin line of glue to one of the cords ends, and push the cord beside it up against it. Hold until the glue has cooled a little and pull the cord straight again. You can use the glue gun's point to redistribute the glue as needed to stick-down and smooth-down the loose fibers in the cord's end. Repeat for the other side. If you wait for the "right" amount of time after applying the glue, you can accomplish this by rolling the connection between your finger and thumb. Yes, it will be kind of hot, and yes, very very sticky. The feeling is like touching a wet finger to a metal surface on a bitter cold day, but with the opposite extreme of temperature!
If all goes well you'll have a connection like this.
MARK NEEDLE ENTRY AND EXIT POINTS
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We want the glued connection to be at the bottom of the bottom loop. By stretching a loop across two fingers with the connection on one finger, mark the opposite point ni the loop across the other finger.
Before doing this step, it's good to see what the *actual* sizes of your loops are. Mine very conveniently came out to about 30cm all the way around. That means the top-strings will be 10cm and the bottoms 20. So, I marked the needle entry and exit points at 5cm from that center point.
(Note: Unlike most garland designs, this ones top-string is never stretched, so there's no need to compensate by making the top a bit shorter than 1/2 the bottom.)
PREPARE TO BUILD[]
This garland's left half is like a mirror image of its right half. In this way, each loop hangs with less of an opening to the wind as you're raising it up from the juice, thus reducing premature bubble production. I'm using 16 loops, so at this point I put 8 to the side for later.
I figured the length of the fishing line I needed at xx". For each of the 16 loops I figure 4" for each loop top-string, 3/4" space between loops, and 1/2" for knots. That's 84" (16 x 5.25). I also want two 5" leaders and some extra line for tying their knots. So I cut my line to 110".
BUILD THE FIRST HALF[]
Thread the needle. No problem since the eye is so big!
Insert the needle into a loop a little past (inside) one of the marked entry/exit points and bring it out again at that marked point. You only need to surround 1 or 2 of the braid's stitches. The needle must go THROUGH the center of the cord, not through the opposite side.
Pull all except about 8 inches of the line through the cord.
Form a knot around that bit of braid you've surrounded. It need only be a simple overhand knot. Yes, there's still a LOT of line to pull through after every stitch or knot.
Insert the needle into the first hole you made (or very near it), feed it through the center of the cord, and bring it back out at the the other marked entry/exit point, which of course is an exit point, at this point.
Your work should look like this now.
If you hold that first knot tight against the cord and stretch the cord out, you can see the farthest point at which the line would have to exit from the inside of the cord. Here, I'm marking that point by tying a knot. You could instead use a marker or tie on a bit of string to mark it. At about 1/2" from this point, the next loop should begin. UPDATE: It's best to make a knot around a piece of braid where the line exited the cord, with the cord stretched out. Otherwise the top sections of cord tend to shrink disproportionally to the bottoms.
Now, you continue as you did with the first loop. Note that the next knot in the next loop's corner is about 1/2" from that previous marker knot.
BUILD THE SECOND HALF
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After you've used half your loops, the stitching procedure is reversed. Here, I've marked (with a knot) the target point for the extent of the next loop's top-string.
Instead of tying a knot around a few fibers in one of the next loop's entry/exit points, you simply feed it in through one point, through the cord's center, and bring it out the opposite point.
Hold the previous marker knot tight against the previous entry point and stretch the cord away from it. The point where the line exits the cord is the point where we want to make the next knot around a few fibers of the braid.
When you've run out of loops, you're basically done! I like to tie rings about 5" from the final loop on each end for attachment to my poles. This type of fishing line is very slippery. The knots in the body of this garland needn't be very secure, but to tie it to leader rings, you should at the very least use an improved clinch knot. (http://www.animatedknots.com/improvedclinch/)