Moving through the rainbow in a predictable Western sort of way (almost google-ish? 8) the letter ‘N’ is orange. I wanted each knot to be from a different knot family as well, and for the nicely straight parts of the ‘N’, the plafond seemed like a good choice. For the corners, something with more built in flexibility would be needed. When I look at the centre of the plafond knot, what I see is the centre of the sauvastika knot. Perhaps this follows logically from the fact that both are built out of interlinked simple overhand knots, but maybe not.

I meant to start last year with this series of knots, but I lost them in the fall move. Being one of those people, I stewed and searched instead of just retying them until late 2009. Of course, when I had retied 1.5 letters I then found the originals. Like wearing a rain coat to ensure that it won’t rain that day, I should have started retying sooner. 8)

Let’s start with the good news. The blogiversary tassels have been awarded to the 2 commenters. I was going to give one and keep one for myself, but as there were only the 2 commenters and I want to encourage y’all, I’ll give them both away and just make myself one later at some point.

I started by binding the tassel neck with a thin black cord. Then after I finished the black version with a beaded tassel neck I decided that the grey version needed more “bling”. To contrast with the randomly beaded neck, plus because I had already put an orderly black whipping on the grey tassel neck, I decided an orderly, lightly beaded design was the way to go. Starting with a round of beads (3 black, 1 silver) around the top and bottom of the existing whipping, I also added a smattering of silver beads to the whipping itself.

The black beads were too small, the clear beads were too big, but I think the iridescent blue beads were just right. Having finished the grey with black, I thought there’s no reason I can’t use different beads on each side. The visual crossover is quite minimal. That said, when it was time to bead the neck of the tassel, I wanted to use both bead colours. I like random, so I would stab the needle into either bead colour to pick up a selection of beads and then pick a random direction to sew it down. If beads wanted to sit funny or bulge, I would go back and tack them down to the tassel bundle which also helped to reinforce the binding effect of the randomly beaded neck.