How To Braid Your Own Pads

Braiding Simply Explained

Braiding is a soothing activity requiring a coordination of hands and eyes enjoyed by children and adults alike. Children (especially girls) learn to braid hair at a young age. What is a braid? It's a structure or pattern that's made by intertwining strands of material repeatedly. From the strands, a large structure such as a thicker strange or even a sheet is formed.

People braid all sorts of things - some function like rope, mats, and of course chair pads. Some decorative like hair, artwork, and horse tails. The difficulty is not the intertwining of fibers but rather how to build up larger structures from the smaller ones. Intertwining of fibers immediately results in the basic unit of the braid: the plait. The creation of things like mats and pads involves knowing how to bend or turn the plaits into the shape of larger objects.

Watch Online

A great place to start is to watch how people braid larger items like rugs and mats. There is a good online video on rugs which shows the basics of the process. The starting material is strips of cloth.

In this video, Marge's Braided Rugs goes through the process by breaking it down into a series of steps. These steps include learning how to create the "T" or starting configuration of cloth, "twice-overs", "tapers", "color transitions", etc and finally how to take care of the rug over the long term.