Before I made a stand to do beaded crown sinnets with, I first did it by hand and then made a foam tool. This is the story of the foam tool. Now, I have foam flooring tiles which I purchased from the local hardware store, so I have the raw material to make custom foam tools at will.

This is what I used: which includes:

• chunk of foam
• round head fasteners (any office supply store should have these)
• and some pliers, although the fasteners are soft enough you could probably do it by hand </ul> I had tried using a kumihimo disc already, and I knew I didn't want slots, but help keeping the strands separate meant a shape with concave sides like so: The hole was for the finished braid to pass through. Lastly I wanted somewhere to park the pass through loop, somewhere above the plane of the tool. So, I got some fasteners and made this shape: and pushed it through the foam. The finished thing looks like this: Ergonomically, holding the tool was definitely easier than holding just the braid. Did the star shape help with fumbling around for the strands? I think it did. Did the pass through loop parking prong do the trick? If you were using cord, I think it would have been a waste of time since there was still some fumbling involved with the prong. Using thread as I was for stringing the beads, it was definitely better than nothing. Were I to work on refining the foam tool, I would extend two of the star arms, and maybe carve a channel into them to hold the parked loop to make a bigger target, using bigger gestures. Using the loop parking prong as above was still more fiddly than I would like.