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 2) getting the proper over and unders on the back is always trickier than on the front (of course, I knew this already, but it’s always useful to remind oneself of this fact)

And so it was that I was able to finally successfully tie the knot (see right). It still needs work, of course, I’ve tightened it up too tightly and this particular knot clearly needs room to breathe. So, I will need to either tie it again and tighten more gently this time or execute the more difficult (but less mindful) task of adding slack back into a knot. Right now the hole in the middle is smaller than I would like, and the properly tightened version may still suffer that fault.

One more try and then I will decide between the basic hexagonal with less overlap or the type 2.

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