Carol James went to Korea for a couple of weeks and took an intensive course on maedup (매듭) at Dong Lim Knot Museum. Luckily for us, to help herself remember, she's posted a number of videos to her YouTube channel.

She begins with the double connection (two strand Matthew Walker, 도래매듭, dorae maedup, machine translation: advent):

My entertainment reading of choice is science fiction, fantasy, myths, legends, the occasional light horror if written by a favourite author, that sort of thing. As a general rule I stay out of the romance, mystery, fiction and literature areas of bookstores. I will often be found on the children/youth sections looking for books for the kids as well as myself (I have a particular soft spot for remixed fairy tales). Where knots intersect with fantastic fiction, well, it's a happy place for me.

A book I have just finished rereading (bed time story for Tiger for the last couple of weeks) is Hellspark by Janet Kagan, and therein the character of layli-layli calulan (a shaman of Y) ties and unties a "glittery koli thread" throughout the story (I have read this book many times in my life, but reading it out loud was just brutal if totally worth the effort 8). "Intricate" knots are tied in her "thread" as both meditation and ritual. When she is done, she pulls on both ends of her thread and all the knots come undone.

In print in one form or another pretty much continuously since 1981, this book is responsible for reviving the art of Chinese knotting and likely many cascade effects.

First was the original (Traditional) Chinese edition published in Taiwan (the cover of the original Chinese edition is identical in illustration to the English edition pictured at left but for the title rendered in Chinese text):
中國結
Author: 陳夏生 (Chen Hsia-Sheng, chén xià shēng)
ISBN: ??
Publisher: ECHO Publishing Company; 1 edition (January, 1981)
Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.7 inches

Soon followed by an English edition also published in Taiwan and distributed by Tuttle (see left):
Chinese Knotting
Author: Lydia Chen
ISBN: 0-8048-1389-2
Hardcover: 116 pages
Publisher: ECHO Publishing Company; 1 English edition (January, 1982)
Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.7 inches

The easiest way for me to enter Chinese text is by typing English text and getting something to translate it for me. Generally speaking this does 60% of the job. Then there are the characters that are more difficult to translate, so I need to enter them directly. For this task I like to write the characters into a system that does Chinese handwriting recognition. For this job I used the free iTranslate iPhone app and the nciku dictionary. I used the iTranslate app, mostly because I was out, but it had the added advantage of quickly swapping the Chinese and English back and forth from the translate/translated windows for refinement of the desired characters. Also, unlike the other translation apps on my phone, iTranslate allowed me to get the data out (via email in this case). Apparently iTranslate is "powered by Google" and indeed once I got home I also used Google Translate with largely the same results although there is no handwriting recognition involved there.

I want to catalogue my knotty book collection (and braids and any related crafts) and this seems like a good place to do it. Well, the main site is where it should probably end up, but here's a good place to work on it, I can add curating on the other side.

The Ashley Book of Knots
Author: Clifford W. Ashley
ISBN: 0-385-04025-3
Hardcover: 640 pages
Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (June 21, 1944)
Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.6 x 1.6 inches

While not particularly decorative, this is visually interesting. It's a rope trick (and it's definitely a trick, watch her hands carefully. Here's the video:
http://www.math.toronto.edu/~drorbn/Gallery/KnottedObjects/WaistbandTric...

Here's a line diagram of what's happening from Kauffman's On Knots (page 98-99) via Google Books
http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=BLvGkIY8YzwC&pg=PA98

So, about halfway through, I ran out of the copper wire I was using. I could have gotten more, but I had a spool in the same gauge of magnet wire, which also happened to be reddish. Reddish, festive and xmas-y, although it wouldn't go very well with the green and purple I was using before, so I changed the base cord colour to white. I was going to use some pink too, but forgot as I got into the flow of construction. The final knot including the hanging thread is in the picture to the left, and to the right is the knot in it's gift packaging (little organza bags from eBay).

As usual around the winter festive season I start thinking of stars and snowflakes. I had an 8 pointed star/flower in mind that I had prototyped last year, but as I developed the idea (add more bling/zing), it had less of a star aspect to it. I still think it's quite ornamental though, and simple enough to put into production considering a late-ish start (teacher gifts for 3 kids including a whole host of extracurricular activities, even missing some that finish in early-mid December still leaves 12-14 teachers/coaches).

One of the many names for the Chinese button knot is the one strand diamond knot. Strangely enough, the exact same knot can also be called the two strand diamond knot. This wackiness is due to the idea that if the top of the knot is a loop, then there is only one strand of cord tying the knot. If, instead, there are two separate cords instead of a loop at the top, then it is a knot tied in 2 cords, hence two strand button knot. It's a very fine distinction that I chose not to make most of the time (what exactly is it if you've tied it with one "strand" and then cut the top loop, eh? 8)

A simple modification of a mystic '+' from Lydia Chen's Chinese Knotting 2 gives us a nice 'T'. There was nothing inherently difficult about the process, but I had to retie it a few times because I kept miscounting and ending up with one side longer than the other (not paying enough attention while doing). Also, in trying to keep the stem and crossbar join crisp, I ended up tightening the whole works a bit more that I would like, in final analysis.

Maybe I should redo it. If I do, I'd probably take one unit off of each side of the crossbar.

Generally speaking, after a point, I find adding slack back into a knot more difficult than just retying it. How about you?