Now, I would like to say that I proceeded from my preliminary layout sketch to a path sketch, decided that it wouldn’t work and then carried on to the next layout. But as you can tell from the title of this entry as well as the ordering of the posts, that’s not what happened. I had done a first pass through of the scaffold with one end of my tracing cord from the top and at that point realized that it was probably not going to work. So it was at this point than I went to the path sketch with the result you see here. Not enough coverage, the path does not complete through all the loops with one cord as required. Totally not going to work. Layout fail, move on to the next loop mapping.

Preparing to tie my proposed double plafond knot, I created a scaffold by tying a regular plafond and then tying a sauvastika knot in sequence.

So, start by sketching out the 2 centres, one over the other connected, two cords coming in the top and out the bottom. These are the assumptions I started with. So, then there are 2 cord terminal points on either side of each centre. How should those points be joined? This is my first layout sketch.

So, what do you think? Will it work?

Backing up a step, I took a second to map the cord paths through the body of the single plafond knot. A square symbolizes what I consider to be the mass of the knot and letters mark the entrance and exit points. The two (sort of) directed graphs show the cord path THROUGH the knot and away from the knot.

I had my frame around 2 diamond centres, but I wanted the side structures to be balanced. Here’s a first sketch (sans-frame) with some cord paths. You can see that even by the bottom of the sketch I was giving up the idea that (1) my sketched paths were accurate or (2) that the sketched paths were useful. No doubt if I were a better draughter that would not be true, but…