Without further ado, here's a couple of photos of myself demonstrating on prototype #1 a few years back at the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival:
Of note, this stand is literally the entire reason I got into woodworking. The wide blue-and-silver silk scarf visible on the table in those photos "broke" my traditional takadai, by which I mean its width made it incredibly inefficient to work. So I set about a long process of tweaking the traditional design in ways that removed certain limitations when working very wide and/or complex braids. Traditional, but with the ceiling lifted on certain kinds of work. (Insert amazingly dull training montage of woodworking, CAD, basic mechanical design, etc.
) This design is also deliberately modular, in that components from two stands can be combined into one stand, useful for certain complex work.While I get my shop up and running, I'm working on a significant revision to this stand based on lessons learned from its use by myself and others. That will include a number of functional and aesthetic revisions.
To get a feeling of how the takadai works in practice, here's a YouTube video of Hiroyuki Kondou, a Japanese master braider.
One last image, of my traditional takadai. This is a common, contemporary design where the braider sits at the stand in a chair. Compare to Hiroyuki-san's stand, where he's seated on a raised platform built into the stand itself. My design takes inspiration from an American artist and braider, Richard Sutherland, who modified his stand for standing-height work.
