Kumihimo

The kits came with "weave wheels" those weave wheels let you do kumihimo. Kumihimo makes a rope like bracelet and you can do some really cool things with them. The picture shows my in progress one that has a cupcake design on it. Now the weave wheels that came with the kits have designs printed on them but you can use them to do any design you want really. The cardboard ones do fall apart eventually and I personally had a hard time getting the string in and out of the slits. If you don't like the cardboard ones or want one without designs you can get blank ones like in the picture. I found them at Hobby Lobby near the plastic lanyard lace. You can buy them either in a set of 4 or as a kit of one and some lanyard lace. I bought the pack of 4 because I have now use for the lanyard lace.

The essentials for making a bracelet are string, a ruler, scissors and some way to anchor the bracelet down. I have a few things that I find helpful when making my bracelets, these include a clipboard, small scissors, an ID clip, binder clips in various sizes, a ruler, tape, and coil less safety pins. Now you don't need all this to make bracelets but it is all useful in different ways.

I use coil less safety pins to undo knots if I have made a mistake or to pin the bracelet to my jeans to work on. The reason yo want coil less ones is so that the threads of the bracelets don't get stuck in the coil. If you don't want to pin it to your jeans thats where a clipboard comes in. You can use the safety pin and clip it to the bar on the clipboard or just hole it down with the bar. My bar is bent in the middle so I have to clip it to the bar. I like to use ID clips to clip it to the bar personally but a safety pin will also work. 

Binder clips are handy for if you make your own clip board out of cardboard and duct tape. They act as the bar on a regular clip board. For beginners a homemade clip board would actually be best because yo can cut slits in the bottom to put the strings in so they stay in the right order and you don't get confused. You could even mark off inches on the clipboard so you always have a ruler with you.

Heres a few awesome videos for people who are beginners at making friendship bracelets. This first video shows the four basic knots you need to know to make any and all bracelets. Knowing these four knots is all you need to make any pattern.

The second video shows you how to make the most basic of bracelets, the candy stripe. To make this you only need to know the first knot shown in the first video.

Beyond Bracelets makes fantastic videos and she explains things really well. I hope her videos help you and believe me she has tons more to watch.