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:

What I’ve done here is taken the cut end of the 3mm red satin cord and butted them together and sewn them with a black thread. If I had wanted the join to be more invisible, I should have (1) used red thread and (2) either lightly heat sealed the ends or treated them with Fray Check or similar product.

With those nice hexagonal beads, I wanted to frame them with a hexagonal knot. It didn’t need to be particularly stable as I’d be reinforcing the central area with thread (and more beads), so likely I’d be taking a hexagonal knot and reduce the amount of overlapping an favour of a bigger centre hole, the better to display the framed bead rather than hide it. Looking through Lydia Chen’s third book, I decided on the “Type 2 Compound Constellation Knot” which unlike your basic hexagonal stellar knot (which is uouu) has a structural loop path of uuouo. At this point I’ve tied it about 6-7 times and each time it looks… funny. As usual with a new polygonal knot, it’s the last interlacing pass on the back side that’s tricky.

As mentioned in my review of the globe knot book, my bead group wanted to learn some globe knots so I picked 18JBD for it’s relative simplicity (facet number) and snazzy appearance. Of course, in order to follow the instructions from the book, one is going to need a tool. Since buying the official tool just to try one knot seems little excessive, I came up with a makeshift tool that should cost pennies to construct.

This one has 18 facets (18JBD). The base bead is less football shaped (kinda pointy towards the poles, vaguely oval/eye shaped in cross section) and more oblate. The best I could do on short notice, but overall I like the resulting globe knot better. The question is do I like it better because of the core bead shape or because of the more facets to the globe? I’m going with the facet idea.