Sidney Wood

I have issues from the present back to the late 90's for sale. I am moving the shop to a new location and don't want to move them. The pattern inserts are complete and unused. I would sell the whole bunch for $3.00 each. If you want individual issues to complete a collection I would probably ask a little more. I am hip deep in real estate agents at the moment but in a couple of days I could provide a complete inventory to anyone interested. I can take Pay-Pal to my personal account. PM me here or at stwood@taylortel.net Sidney Wood P.O. box 2 Clyde Tx-79510 ps I will attach an inventory here as time allows.

Ron Edwards "Advanced Leather Work Vol 1" Interesting Braids And Flat Plaits, covers just about every aspect of Croc ridges including the "applied" type that will do anything you could want. See Ramskull Press for the source for this book if you don't have it. Sidney Wood

All of Ron Edwards books + Tom Hall's and a lot of other good stuff is available from Martin Coombs at Sidney Wood

I need a couple of 12 inch or so trees for little kids saddles Sidney Wood

I don't think the animal is as important as the tannage. I have used a veg tanned goat that is intended for boot lining for decorative knots for 15 years or so and I prefer it to roo. It depends on the job. 8 oz harness leather makes fine roper reins, for example. There is a guy locally that cuts fine braiding strings from chap leather. The trick is good leather, as there is junk in all kinds. Most commercial lace can vary greatly in quality from spool to spool. The trick is see it before you buy it if possible, or find a source you can trust. Sidney Wood

I have a suggestion and a question. suggestion- don't try it with rawhide, but a couple of trips across a can of white Fiebing's with good roo or goat lace helps the braiding (and tightening) a bunch. Question- How do you folks who do them tight to start with get the interweaves into a tight foundation for two or three pass pineapples of any length (or other multistring interweaves for that matter) Sidney Wood

Hallis; For any braided knot to look right, it needs to be the right size for the circumference of the object it is put on. The number of bights is the determining factor. If it is too big for the work it is going on, it bunches up into a wad, and if too small, it flattens out to a bunch of parallel strings. The optimum finished size is approx, (1.4X the width of the string) X the number of bights. The secret is that there is not a turkshead, but an almost limitless number of them that will fit anything from a pencil to a barrel. Sidney Wood

I just want to say that the tutorial on fid work is one of the best things I have seen lately and the effort is a amjor contribution to our craft. Sidney Wood

About my previous reply. I was in error about the W knot. I miss counted the inner passes. It is in fact a perfect 2 pass gaucho. Had it had the 3 pass inner count that I thought I saw it would been a fan. Actually the gaucho- fan - and headhunter (and some others) are very similar to a family of column coded braid patterns that just differ in details. Sorry abouit that, you were right the first time. Sidney Wood

The W knot by Woolery is what Grant calls the small fan knot. PPs 426 - 427. The same knot is on the cover of "Tom Hall"'s book. In fact you can't get what the purists call a true gaucho with a two string interweave. It can be done with one string, or three strings for an interweave. This matter of knot "names" has led to as much pointless debate as anything I know of. The only way to precisely identify any specific knot is by Parts X Bights and code sequence. This gives way too many possibilities to give individual names for them all. If you look at the gaucho as a color pattern, it can be done in many forms. Sidney Wood

I don't know of anything on line off the top of my head, but Grant shows 4 string version on pps 108 & 109 of the Encylopedia of Rawhide and Leather Braiding. Ron Edwards shows the same knot on pps 28 & 29 of his original Advanced Leatherwork ( Ramskull Press) where he calls it a gumknot button. They are just a crown and then wall and will work with any number of strings. There are several other buttons in the Ron Edwards book that would also work. By the way, my corral hat has a 38 bight spanish ring knot for a hat band. Sidney Wood

As usual I fat fingered the keyboard on the last reply. That is Martin Combs.(Books on Tall Ships etc) Ramskull still lists it on their site. Sorry about that. Sidney Wood

The best thing on this is one of the small books by Ron Edwards titled "The Secret Plait"'. He shows two ways to do the three plait and one method that works for tthree -five- seven---up to thirteen plait and the way to extend it to any odd number. I particularly like the seven plait version. The book is probably available from Martin Coombs in the Us Ramskull Press in OZ Sidney Wood

Does anyone have experience with the file storage sites that will allow public access for file sharing for every type of file, and not just images Any reccomendations or opinions would be greatly appreciated Sidney Wood

You might want to go to Visit My Website and look at pineapple knots under the interweaves section for a general method for any two string pineapple. Sidney Wood

I have been using the bit mapped graphic editor "Paint" in Windows to make templates for braided knots, flat and round braids, for some time. The trick is to create a basic uncoded mat grid of some size and extract the braid pattern you need and code it apropriatly. I have an article on "The Basic Turkshead" about this for the knots and the same idea works for flat and round braid. The url is taylortel.net/~stwood. All the knot diagrams on the site were done this way. Sidney Wood

What you need is veg tanned for boot and shoe lining. The skins are of an even thickness with no flanky areas, usually. I suspect that chrome tanned would be the usual junk it almost always is. I question any coating on the skins as they should be dry. What you got may have been book binding stuff. The only possible source I have found for the boot lining is Charles Hardtke Inc in El Paso. They also have good roo when they can get it. I am sorry that you had a bad experience with this. Sidney Wood

I have been braidinf on and off for about 65 years and have found that you can braid with a multitude of materials. By the way goat rawhide is fine if you can find it but I haven't seen any since I sold my herd. If you want to see some work with goat lace, Google "The Basic Turkshead" for my site. I bought 50 or so goat skins at a Boot and Saddlemakers Roundup in Brownwood Tex some years ago and it may prove to be a lifetime supply since you can get a lot of lace out of one skin if you are careful. I use it for most things of a decorative nature. Just about everything but motorcycle seat lacing Sidney Wood

Denise; I regularly use one of the printer driver converters to make PDF's It used to just about halve the size of a Word doc. when I was still using it. The best format for any web page is semantic HTML and CSS for layout and styling (in regard to file size) You can even use the CSS styling to strip the chrome from a page to make it printer friendly. (Don't use my site as an example, I haven't gotten around to it yet) In fact I use a text editor ans a small CSS file for a word processer and print from the browser. What is your URL, I would like to see what your doing, maybe could send you some stuff you could use by email. Sidney Wood

The style statements them selves were added to HTLM 4.0 and the cascading sheets are just a method of implementing them. I don't know for sure about the wep page building programs as I write my own HTMl with a text editor. You could look at the page source from o source that used one of them (probably be listed under "generator in the head" , for a style sheet reference or style tags in the head or body of the page. If this interests you the best thing is to go to WWW Consortium page ae http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp and look at the tutorials. The cover HTML, CSS Java Script and a lot more, with references for everything. Sidney Wood

CSS is Cascading Style Sheets. It is one of the "dialects" that the browsers "speak" . It allows you to style the presentation of the HTML or XHTML content of a page or pages with style statements inline- in the head of a page, or a separate css file. By having the style (colors, fonts, positioning, borders, etc. in a style sheet file you can add pages with HTML that will be like all the rest without going through all the style stuff again. You con also change the appearance of a whole site with one style sheet. This approach also results in much smaller HTML files. Sidney Wood

Robert; The internet technolgy is in a constant state of evolution and most of the older software to create web pages tend to become obsolete in that they produce a lot of unnecessary code and large files. Of course I haven't tried the all and there may be exceptions. All you need for basic display of content is HTML for the content and CSS to make it look the way you want it. As both can be done with a simple text editor, I found it easier to do with the tools I already had than having to learn new software. The only software I have kept for my work on my site is a free text editor called "The Crimson Editor" that highlights the html elements. A trip through the W3C tutorials will give you an idea of how simple the basic process is. Broken down into simple steps the whole thing is not so overwhelming. Something you need to stay away from is the old method of using html tables for page layout and use CSS instead. The things that drive this approach for me are an insatiable curiosity (and the time to satisfy it) and wanting to do things the way I want instead of the way dedicated programs will let me. An interesting thing is to use view in the browser and look at the page source for the site you are at. You will find some that go on forever to produce a page that that could have been done with half a page of code. By the way, I worked closely with the telephone people in Brownwood for several years in the 80's when I maintained the old microwave path that fed their toll circuits out of Abilene. I particularly remember Bob Stewart, Charlie Gamblin and Ken Ellis. Good luck with a web site and if I can help dont hesitate to ask. Sidney Wood stwood@taylortel.net If you want to look at my site about braided knots it is http://taylortel.net/~stwood

I have just been down this road and I found that I got the best results doing it the hard way. Just use html and css with a simple editor. Note pad has been used to create some awesome sites. A good place to get started is the w3Schools tutorials. Google w3c for their url. Sidney Wood

TwoCrow So far as I can see the math involved in knot theory has nothing to do with braiding a knot. However there are a couple of things that do help. They are some stuff "Tom Hall" covered in his book about turksheads. I have covered the way I use them on my site at taylortel.net/stwood. (Just Google The Basic Turkshead for the url.) The topic titled Run Lists lets you generate the path across a knot with any coding you want. Sidney Wood

CharlieR; I could expound on this knot size business to great length but it would be simpler for you to go to taylortel.net/~stwood or just Google "The Basic Turkshead" . One thing- increasing the knot as you braid is just a nmenic device that to braid similar knots by. it increases the size in a minimum of two in both bights and parts which is a little much for fine adjustment. I really perfer knots with a prime number for the bights because you can pick them in one part increments for length. Any braided knot with a given number of bights can be tightened over a fairly wide -2 to 1 at least with just a small decrease in length as the circumference is increased. Sidney Wood