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?

Feeling unequal to the task of dealing with my massive backlog of links that I need to post at the time, I decided to fiddle with the blog itself. I put in a blogroll on the side, and a Google gadget to translate the page for people who would like a translation (I didn’t read the source code before I included it, bad, Carol!, I wonder if the readers need enough English to read the “Google Translate” part… 8). I’m going to try it to see if it will translate all the non-English bits that are in this post into English. 8)

Notes: The Japanese aesthetic is much less exuberant. It is sometimes characterized as simple or peaceful, although….

Notes: The histories of Japan clearly record the wrapping of a gift from China to the Japanese Emperor in 607CE which so impressed him with its elegance that it gave rise to the art of mizuhiki. Hanamusubi is obviously an art closely related to mizuhiki, although hanamusubi’s rise is closely tied to the introduction of Buddhism (in the 6th century, gaining mass acceptance closer to the 8th century)

Procrastination is a strange thing. I was doing pretty well with the daily thing for at least 2 months and then mid-March I stumbled big-time. Then the longer I wasn’t posting, the less incentive there was to post. I came up with a few ideas to help me keep up, but never did them. I tied a number of knots including more Ashley knots and some seasonal ones not to mention finishing the give away tassels. While I haven’t scanned the seasonal knots, I had long ago scanned the give away tassels. Why not post them? It’s quick, no? As the offspring are fond of saying: “I dunno…”