Lanyards

The plastic-lacing craft that '90s kids knew as gimp or boondoggle is older than it feels, and it comes from France. It's named after 'Scoubidou,' a 1958 song by the French singer Sacha Distel, and it took off as a craft fad in France in the late 1950s. Two kinds of lace circulated: flat colored strips (the 'lanyard' or 'gimp' thread) and the round, hollow, supple PVC tubes more associated with the scoubidou name — both sold cheap on spools in bright, sometimes glow-in-the-dark colors.

The craft is all about the stitches. The workhorse was the square stitch — the box stitch — worked with two strands crossed over each other again and again to build a squared-off cord. From there the vocabulary opened up: the cobra twist, the Chinese staircase (one strand spiraling around a core), the butterfly, the barrel knot, the double spiral. Kids swapped techniques the way they swapped anything else, and a mastered cobra stitch was a small flex. The finished lengths became keychains, zipper pulls, friendship bands, and trinkets — though honestly the making was the point, not the product.

It's a classic summer-camp and rec-room craft in North America, where the regional names — gimp in the Northeast, boondoggle elsewhere, craftlace on the spool — are half the nostalgia. The fad has resurfaced more than once, notably a big European revival around 2004 and 2005, but for a lot of American kids the memory is fixed in the '90s: a fistful of neon plastic lace, sore fingertips, and a lopsided box-stitch keychain you were weirdly proud of.