Discovery - Chinese Knotting Part 2

So, ages ago I talked about discovering Chinese Knotting and purchasing a book so I could try it out. I finally sat down with the book and tried out a few very basic knots.

(Remember, you can click on photos to enlarge them!)

This is the first knot in the book. There weren't really any steps to photograph, but you can see that mine actually looks kind of like the photo! Amazing, if you ask me. This is obviously a very loose knot, so to keep its shape, the author reccommends stitching it together (a dab of glue would work too, but wouldn't look as nice).

This is my cat, Asmodeus, "helping" me. At least I managed to keep him from sitting on my book. I wasn't so lucky keeping him from trying to eat my cord as I knotted.




This is the start of the next knot I tried. Interestingly, it's just a basic square knot around the other side of the cord. I suppose I shouldn't expect anything too intricate from beginner's knotting. I don't know about you, though, but I don't think of square knots as being very pretty.


Voila! Done. Well... it was at about this point that I learned that the cord I was using was probably too thin, especially for just starting out. It's hard to tell that my knot is much like the picture below, the diagram I was working from.



You can see my cat was still helping out. By covering the instructions. (Sigh :) ). I do think the diagrams work well for teaching the knots, but I do have to sit there a few moments making sure I'm certain which part goes above or below which other part. And you can see how thin my cord is compared to the example. I was using some nylon cord I had lying around, but I'll probably have to get a sturdier rattail cord.

And here begins knot number three. The author, Lydia Chen, suggest sometimes using pins in a board (or cardboard, in my case) to help keep everything in place. I decided to give it a go for the most complicated knot I've tried yet.



In the process of tying the knot. It's called a Sauvastika Knot (yes, that should sound familiar), but looks more like a simple flower when finished. If I were clever, I would have taken a picture of the diagram so you could compare mine to the example, but I had trouble with this one and got frustrated and forgot. Oops.





At this point, I had tried to tighten the knot after the previous step, but it didn't look right. So, I started over, since I realized I wasn't tightening the right bits. You can see that the basis of this knot is two intertwined square knots. Clever, that.



The "finished" knot. I still don't think it was correct, but the thin cord was hiding any mistakes I was making. Comparing this to the diagram, I couldn't tell exactly where I went wrong. So, that is certainly a lesson learned. I'll be giving it another go when I get a hold of a thicker cord. Still, it's a lot of fun trying something new. It's going to take some work before I'm at a point where I can knot properly, I'm guessing. But worth it, since I hope to learn a few knots that will look good on my greeting cards.

Hope you enjoyed seeing some of my learning process, and a just a few of the very basic knots you can make with this pretty unique craft. You can bet I'll keep updating you on how it's going over time.