You see the pictures of Korean braiding stands from time to time. The hard core Korean knot tyers braid their own cord. It's a beautiful piece of machinery and just as a sculptural object, nifty looking. I have yearned after one for years.

The Dong-Lim Korean knotting museum in Seoul, Korea has it's own website!! Tell you later after I have at it with some brute force clicking and online translators what especially cool treasures (I hope!) lie within...
http://shimyoungmi.com/

Events
Preparing for their upcoming Paracord contest, Instructables has posted a collection of example paracord projects.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Paracord/

"This week, West Swamp Mennonite Church in Milford is holding its fifth annual knotting marathon called Why Knot." What they're knotting are blankets. I'm not really sure what "knotting comforters" entails, but it certainly sounds like it's for a good cause (sending blankets to Haiti).
http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/news_details/article/92/2010/march/24/kn...

Knot in Korean (romanized), maedup or maedeup. Po-tae-toe po-tah-toe or more accurately Beijing vs Peking. I first saw it as maedup and still see it as that from time to time, it's shorter, I like short. Brevity is good. When I'm copying something down and it's written as maedeup, I'll copy it that way though. So, no consistency. Sorry.

But, knot in Korean (Hangeul) is 매듭. No confusion there.

Traditional knot: 전통매듭 jeon-tong-mae-deup

In the translation grid below, I'm leaving the "maedeup" off of the Korean romanization (MCT), "knot" or "매듭" off of names from time to time to keep the table as compact as I can without excessive ambiguity. Consider them implied if they're not there. 8) Also, if the romanization has dashes in it, I probably got it from an online conversion tool, if it doesn't, then I got it from one of my books.

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):

I had just finished going through a big stack of videos that I had found on youku, a youTube-like site in China (search for Chinese knotting:中国结 and knotting art:结艺) when my knot (매듭 in Korean) search brought me a practical knot result. That's ok. I've got nothing against practical things and it's not like that automated search turns up many results in general, but it got me to thinking, how to refine this search to produce a more focused decorative result? Taking another look at Kim Hee-Jin's maedup site and Korean Traditional Knots and started parsing down this string "한국의 전통매듭" which as a string translates to "Korea's traditional knot". Previously, I had determined that "매듭" means "knot" so that left the "전통" part. Traditional, eh?

"한국의" translates as "South Korea" and "국의" translates as "country". I should not have been surprised that none of the individual parts translated as "south" which is apparently "남쪽". 8)

South Korean ssamzisarang has been posting videos about Korean culture. They look somewhat like short segments from TV (interstitials?), but original or not, the video compression was dialed way up, at least on the good luck (chrysanthemum) knot video. The soundtracks on the videos are kinda distracting which makes me think that they are not professional productions, but I could easily be wrong.

In any case, there are only 2 knot-relevant videos:
동심결매듭 전통매듭 korean knot which is the good luck (chrysanthemum) knot and a 4 ear variant
전통매듭 Korean Knots - 자리매듭 brooch knot 만들기 which shows the ocean plat, if I'm not mistaken.

Notes: Cord braiding and silk knotting arrived with the Chinese Lolang colony in northwestern Korea in approximately 10 BCE. Integration of decorative knots as a part of traditional Korean dress seems to have happened during the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE - 668 CE). Decorative knotting evolved in the hands of fishermen and textile artisans in the general population until the late 19th-early 20th centuries when royal norigae artisans under pressure to create newer, different, better, and more did exactly that.

Text: Cord and knot arts arrived with a Chinese colony in Korea in 10 BCE.

Maedup flowered under the royal norigae artisans in the late 19th-early 20th centuries.

Pictures
Some wacky artisan (interior design firm??) from the Netherlands is taking spongy looking "cords" and knitting them, they also tie really big knots... just follow the link and look! 8) [via]
http://baukeknottnerus.nl/

Some knotted wallhangings from a cultural website.
http://traditions.cultural-china.com/en/16T1961T4661.html

From the same site comes another set of pictures (note, they translated the button knot as the buckle knot. That confused me for a while...)
http://traditions.cultural-china.com/en/15Traditions335.html

Interesting jewelry. Some knotted, some just evoking knots.
http://cruststation.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/knotted/

Picture of a sizable mystic knot accompanies a blog with numerous links to knotting how-to videos.
http://salamanderart.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/chinese-knot-tying/

Things to see and do