How to Make a Four Strand Round Braid

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Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi this is Megan with Beadaholique.com and I'm going to show you how to do a basic four strand round braid using flat faux suede cord so this does take up quite a bit of the cord You are going to want to have some extra length for what you want to do you might need to experiment and see how much length you loose to find out how much you will need What you're going to do is take four pieces of flat cord. I have this micro faux ultra suede and tied them together in a overhand knot. I'm using four colors just so that you can keep track of which strand is which you can use all one color like I did in this braid here or you can please just two colors. It's up to you you're gonna need a way to secure your cord to your work surface you can use a safety pin and put it on the leg of your pants like you do for your friendship bracelets. You can keep the ends looped if you're using one or two colors and put it on a hook I'm going to tape it to my table this braid is pretty simple separate the strands okay now you're going to take the leftmost break and you're going to bring it around the middle two and then through the center of them and then you're going to take the right most braid and bring it around the middle two then through the center of them and when you're going to bring these around since you want to create a round braid and not a flat braid make sure that you actually wrap the flat part around and create that tube like shape and those are the only two steps so you just going to repeat. You're going to take the leftmost strand and bring it over one shy of the end wrap it around so you get a nice shape on that bring it back between those two and pull tight I'm going to move this to the edge more so you can get a better angle then you take the right piece bring it back around the middle two and then between them pull them tight the first length is going to look kind of wonky so you'll go ahead and cut that off later. Don't worry about it take your leftmost piece bring it around the middle then between them you can start to see it's kind of looking the way that it's suppose to look rightmost piece over the middle two and then between them make sure you're getting that twisted around so that it it should go in a total spiral, every piece. Two should go this way, two should go this way left piece back behind the middle two over right piece behind it over and if you forget which side you're on you're just going to start with the one that slightly above so you can see that the left piece is raised a little bit higher than the rest of the braid right now. The rest of these strands that's what we're going to work with and make sure that your strengths don't get twisted the wrong way as you're working or else it'll show twists outside on the outside of the braid just going to do a little bit more of this so you can get a handle on what it looks like just keep going over two and then back one left piece over two and back one and it does look nicest when it's pulled tight so you can see it gives us this nice round braid and to finish this you can either just knot the ends you can loosen your first knot. If you're top part is messy you can go down far enough and do a new knot you can do overhand knots to tie it off or if u want to put it into a cord end like i did here if your cord end is solid like if you're using for example a kumihimo finding and it's a solid finding, you can take some clear tape and put it around the braid and then snip it with scissors and glue it in for these ones here how you can see to the end actually I just tied off really tightly with some nylon beading thread and then clipped right above so that you can't see it but be careful and always secure around the braid before you cut the end off or else it will unravel and it will get really messy That is how you do a Four Strand Round Braid