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.

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?

This was the last letter completed (although I am still fiddling with the letter 'O') because I knew I wanted to use inspiration from John Hensel's Book of Ornamental Knots but misplaced it a for good long while (sadly there seems to be distinct theme there). Using one of the epaulet type knots (will look up and correct later) for the crossbar merged with the infinitely extensible prolong knot for the stem, it ended up looking pretty much as envisaged. It felt quite like mathematical knotwork when pulling and stretching the cord during stem construction.

Next up yellow and the letter 'O'. Obviously, for the letter 'O' we'd need a round knot. I had two initial thoughts: something big and sunny or a hollow round form. I started with a 8x3 bao knot but it really didn't want to hold the form (cord too soft? fumble hands?) so I moved on to the 2x12 which had troubles of it's own. When you have so very many ears with such a large centre, they can disappear on you. The centre loops can easily flip and the ears themselves can disappear into the centre in a confusing way. Also, because the centre is so crowded, it is difficult to make the centre structural loops to sit flat. As you can see, I eventually got the 2x12 bao to behave. More or less. But I'm still not sure I'm happy with it. For one, the yellow is such an intense yellow that it encroaches on orange territory.

Moving through the rainbow in a predictable Western sort of way (almost google-ish? 8) the letter 'N' is orange. I wanted each knot to be from a different knot family as well, and for the nicely straight parts of the 'N', the plafond seemed like a good choice. For the corners, something with more built in flexibility would be needed. When I look at the centre of the plafond knot, what I see is the centre of the sauvastika knot. Perhaps this follows logically from the fact that both are built out of interlinked simple overhand knots, but maybe not.

I meant to start last year with this series of knots, but I lost them in the fall move. Being one of those people, I stewed and searched instead of just retying them until late 2009. Of course, when I had retied 1.5 letters I then found the originals. Like wearing a rain coat to ensure that it won't rain that day, I should have started retying sooner. 8)

In any case, we start with a 'K'. Clever people like you can probably guess why, but if not, all will be revealed shortly. The 'K' is tied with a series of square flower knots with a hexagonal flower knot in the middle. I initially thought I might need to tie a heptagonal or octagonal flower for the centre to get the branches of the letter at the correct angle, but a test with a hexagonal centre proved to be close enough to perfect for the job.

The "back" side (see right) is the first side I worked on. I think the bead placement is sometimes sub-optimal. On the "front" side (see left), I made sure to sew the beads higher up on the cords so that they couldn't roll under and hide. I also pulled the cords very tight which ended up covering more of the centre bead with cord, after all that time I spent looking for a knot with a nice big centre hole to showcase the beads.

Even so, I'm pleased with the results (it's certainly a successful proof of concept work). Now it just needs a tassel and it's done.

Here's a progress shot of black version with the centre bead in place. Pretty, no? 8)

As previously mentioned, I decided to tie the hexagonal type 2 stellar knot with my nice and graphic shoelace in hopes of gaining insight as to what exactly was going wrong. As you can see from the picture to the left, I didn't succeed in tying the knot any better with the shoelace, but I did gain insight:
1) the type 2 is created by a process similar to extra overlapping in a standard flower knot