Friendship Bracelets

              Friendship bracelets have long been a part of the sleep-away camp fashion scene and I don't pretend to have been cool enough to discover them before I went to camp. Prior to this Summer however I only knew one pattern, the classic knotted one, I think it's called candy stripe or something. It makes an easy to learn and master bracelet where you can also choose your width. I find it very therapeutic to do these as its very repetitive and after a while you can stop thinking about it. 

              This Summer I was training to be a counselor and grew super envious of all the girls' awesome friendship bracelets so i decided to get back into the habit. I enlisted the help of my artsiest friends and got to work. The easiest step to learn after candy stripe is the V, or I call it the arrow, it's the one that goes back and forth. You do the same knot as the candy stripe except that after you finish doing your first row of all the colors, you go the opposite direction and so forth, it looks awesome and its almost as easy as candy stripe. 
              My friend Jake was really good at the hair wrap type of bracelets and he made me a few but I never came close to mastering it. The closest step I could do was the Chinese staircase, which is actually for lanyard but works just as well with embroidery thread. A girl in the last group I worked with was working on a GIANT arrows head, the one that looks like a V. She was doing 10 colors-which translated to 20 strings and I bracelet that was about 3 inches thick. I asked her how to do it and it turns out it was also pretty easy, just time consuming. I started with only four colors and started working inwards. 

               The funny thing about my new love for friendship bracelets is that I used to have a lot of embroidery threads, until I threw them all out a year ago because I never used them. Sucks to suck I guess. 
               Friendship bracelets were almost a status symbol, as if the number of bracelets you had on correlated to the number of friends you had. Every September you would come back to school and check out the amount of bracelets on and how difficult they looked.  In reality, most of the friendship bracelets I wore were the ones I made, except for three my friends made. 
What about you? Did you make bracelets for yourself or were you nice and gae them to your friends?