Hello world. Today I made another step toward my upcoming wedding being complete: I mad one of our handfasting cords.
For those who don’t know what a handfasting cord is, it’s a beautiful pagan tradition where as you say your vows, your officiant or high priest/ess wraps the cord around your wrists, and then at the end you tie the two together, symbolizing your unbreaking forever bond. You then keep it tied forever, and legend has it if it ever comes undone, so whilst the relationship.
To start your handfast cord, you’ll need a few things:
1. Something HEAVY to hold down your cord as you weave (I used a big stack of CDs, but found it wasn’t heavy enough. For my next one, I’ll definitely be taping it to the table).
2. Three colors of your choice of ribbon. I went with our wedding colors, but you can do whatever speaks to you. I delved a little bit into colors and their meaning, but thought it would be more meaningful with our wedding colors.
3. Scissors
4. Thread or floral wire
5. Charms of your choosing. I used three, and I chose a feather, a key, and a moon. These all have deep personal meanings and connections to me and our relationship, and I won’t get into them. Choose whatever suits you and speaks to you!
So the steps to this are pretty simple! First of all, you’re going to want to take your ribbon off the spool. I took the whole ribbon off, because I didn’t know how much I’d end up needing. You want the finished product to be 5-6 feet, so use your best judgment.
After having your ends, line them all up on your table.
After you have them all lined up, go ahead and tie the tops into a knot, leaving a couple inches of ribbon at the top hanging off.
After you’re all knotted up at the top, make sure you secure your heavy object on the top, or tape it down.
Next, you’re just going to braid the three strands together. I found that the ribbon got EXTREMELY knotted up further down the line as I braided, and the best way I found to rectify this was to knot up the end of the middle color, and keep the other two on each side of me. It takes longer to braid it this way, but it’s worth it not to have to be constantly un-knotting!
Now, like I said earlier, you’re going to want to keep braiding until it’s 5 or 6 feet long! Your length really depends on how many vows you have/the ceremony you’ve written.
Once you get to the desired length, you’re going to knot the end. Make sure and leave yourself about an extra 8-12 inches of ribbon on the end after the knot.
After you finish with the knot, you’re going to want to tie your charms on the TOP of your ribbon. This is important because they aid in weighing the cord down as it’s being wrapped around your wrist. If you tie them on the bottom, they’ll do nothing :).
Basically what I did was thread the charms through their loop, and then triple knot them onto the top knot of my cord.
Once you have all your charms tied on, the rest is up to you! You can either be done, or you can make it a little fancier like I did. I ended up tying a piece of leftover ribbon over the thread knots, and it was pretty cute, so I tied leftover ribbon on in about 1 foot increments on my whole cord. This also aids in adding a little sturdiness.
Once your charms are on, you’re good to go! I was too lazy to also make my fiance’s in the same sitting, so I’ll probably end up making his on Tuesday. The whole process of doing mine probably took about 45 minutes – 1 hour, but if you don’t deal with the tangles like I did, it will go much faster!
Here’s a couple more photos of my finished product, wrapped around my wrist and on my leg to show the charms.
Happy crafting!
maggieofthemoon 