Knotty Notions

I was writing up my Instructable, which tangentially included stuff on qipao buttons, The Genshin Impact Cosplayer's Knot Guide and went looking for a good current page with lots of fancy buttons. I found two: pankou buttons from East Meets Dress which has more pictures and a shred more information on the making and similar from The Pankou which has the Chinese: 盤扣, 盘扣, pán kòu. It was only when reading the latter that I realized that 盤扣, a term I've seen before, actually meant the fancy button knots! Further down, they refine it further: 襻花盤扣, 襻花盘 扣, pàn huā pán kòu, which means floral knotted buttons which they explain is, basically, generic extra fancy. One might describe exact shapes like butterfly (蝴蝶, 蝴蝶, hú dié) but 襻花 describes with sufficient precision.

҉ː̗̤̣̀̈̇ː̖́(⊙。⊙)ː̖́ː̗̤̣̀̈̇҉.

After a little more fussing with translation and search, I landed on 扣盤花襻芯嵌, which brought me to Square inch and clever heart, every detail - exquisite buckle (Part 3) (part 1 is here and part 2 is here)

Apparently today is World Knot Tying Day. Self-declared as it were and not recognized by any (inter)national body as these things usually are. I "heard" about it from Mabel which lead to (I'm assuming the instigators) IGKT Solent (I always read that as Soylent...), which apparently leads to Facebook (just say "No!").

At this point I was going to do an analysis of the THCA and ZGJ tests, then synthesize a program that combines the two… But then I (re) found the Japanese tests which I am now in the process of translating. Clearly, I’m going to need to create a spreadsheet.

The THCA has a specifically labelled instructor or teacher test consisting mostly of hoop flowers (turks head mats) and hollow mystic knots with a few fun cloverleaf and mystic knot variants. The ZGJ set of tests cover perhaps a third of the (admittedly repetitious) content here. The ZGJ advanced test also sprints completely into the wilderness, relatively speaking, with complex and involved projects.