Well, Vancouver's Maker Faire has been turning out gangbusters, as I expected. The crowd is inquisitive and hands-on with the learning displays. Willing and interested in trying out knots. Wanting to know about workshops or local guild meetings. I was sad to report that the PAB meetings are in Los Angeles, but with the level of interest I was observing I see no reason we can't have our own... branch? sub-branch? meetings!

Being the purely decorative sort, it would not be completely simple to help out learners with practical knots, but as I told people, I have all the books and given some warning I can try to work out in advance something in particular that they want to learn. I have nothing if not hubris and the type of mind that works well with learning from books.

Of course, other tactics come to mind. I could put out a inquiry to the local sailing schools, I could hunt down Terry or David (that luddite who refuses to be online 8), I could bribe some of the Seattle boys to come up once in a while, etc, etc.

Vancouver's first Maker Faire is happening June 25-26th, 2011 and I'll be there representing the Pacific Americas Branch of the International Knot Tyers Guild. I'll have a variety of make-and-take projects and will give the occasional rope making demo (participatory!) using (repurposing) plastic grocery bags (in the spirit of the event).

To see what's what, I went to the Bay Area Maker Faire, plus I've been to an organizational meeting for the Vancouver version, so trust me when I say that it will be a blast. Everything from quilters to giant robots with some bacon for seasoning...

Two tying methods for the sauvastika knot (卍字結, 総角結び, 날개 매듭) are complete. The main page is done but for some tweaking and extra "similar knot" and image links.

In Chinese Knotting 3, two variations of the plafond knot are explored, the first is the horizontal plafond knot 横藻井結 (橫藻井结) [héng zǎo jǐng jié]. In this configuration, looking somewhat like a cross between the sauvastika and the plafond knot, I wondered what manipulations would work. The side loops, if too short would pull into the body of the knot and the whole thing would fall apart, but the top loop can't just pull in. With the top loop shortened, it looks like this:

I have shown you how I developed and executed the idea of a double plafond knot. From my available information, this was an entirely novel thing. So I posted my new creation to the main knotting forums, the International Guild of Knot Tyers (IGKT) and the Knot Heads World Wide (KHWW) where a poster from China shared that the two heart plafond is definitely not a brand new idea.

Remove the scaffold and "tada!!" it works. *happy dance*. The knot is front back symmetric and the sides of the frame are fortunately balanced. I like it. I wonder though if there's a way to balance the top and bottom so both have sauvastika knots with ears wrapped around the frame top and bottom. I'm thinking that would be easier to tie (without a scaffold) in the long run and expandable to however many units in the centre of the frame you might want. There's also the figuring out of how to tie this one without a scaffold.

Hmmm...

What do you think? Do you like this one?

I started tying this knot on the scaffold and for some reason didn't have my bodkin. Slow and painful going. I got to the second pass through the top single plafond before I gave it up until I got home and could locate one of my many bodkins. Using a bodkin made it all so much easier. So, here it is, tied on the scaffold. Looks good. Did I overlook something? Will I have what I expect when I remove the scaffold? What do you think? 8)

To everything there's a learning curve, eh? So this time I followed up the loop layout sketch with a path tracing. Looks much better this time. We have complete coverage, all the inputs and outputs are covered and the path is completed by one tracing. Time for string.

So, here's my second loop layout thought. What do you think? Will this one work?

Now, I would like to say that I proceeded from my preliminary layout sketch to a path sketch, decided that it wouldn't work and then carried on to the next layout. But as you can tell from the title of this entry as well as the ordering of the posts, that's not what happened. I had done a first pass through of the scaffold with one end of my tracing cord from the top and at that point realized that it was probably not going to work. So it was at this point than I went to the path sketch with the result you see here. Not enough coverage, the path does not complete through all the loops with one cord as required. Totally not going to work. Layout fail, move on to the next loop mapping.