Now, each cord you use will have different characterisics unique to that type, and the shoelaces I use for my examples are no where near as slippery as most decorative cord choices, so I had to try this knot again in a more standard cord selection, in this case 3mm nylon satin cord. For a button, I would definitely want to use nylon or polyester over rayon as they are much more durable materials, able to deal with constant handling, wear and tear much more gracefully than rayon. Even so, nylon satin cord is far more slippery than the shoelace, and in order to get proper tension on the centre, pretty much all the slack had to be pulled out of the ears, although strangely enough as can be seen in the pictures, one ear was more stable than the others. Of course, if you tightened carefully and then reinforced the centre structure with thread, you could have larger ears if you wanted to.

Another way to get nice ear loops all the way around your polygonal knot is to tie it button style (knobby thing that you could put through a button hole or button loop formed on top of a short stem). There are more flower-ish buttons to follow, but whether the transformation is extensible to the entire family of flower knots is a matter for further research. Now, the knot here (see left) is tied with some nice ear loops because I could, but in practice you probably want the ears tight against the body of the knot so that they don’t catch and the cord doesn’t wear out prematurely.

Now the illustration/instructions for Ashley #589 is of the line and circle (indicating unders) variety. It is extremely difficult to visualize from that, especially for a knot of this complexity. He recommends enlarging the diagram and pinning everything down very carefully. Well, I was winging it freehand, and I’m pretty sure it’s not right, at least the “back side” looks like there’s a mistake (see right). The “front” side on the other hand, looks reasonable except that the loose ends extending through the loops are back to front versus front to back as in the diagram.

Unlike the inline square flower knot (see left), Ashley #588, a rectangular knot is not simply the 1x2 mystic knot (see right) with one end passed through the body of the knot to give a half-hearted extra ear (although it could certainly be done that way). The pass-through occurs earlier and still has no structural support, so the ears still need to be either “closed” or sewn in order that casual handling not destroy the knot.

Consider your standard square flower knot (see right). The structural centre is distinctly square, which is good. But, you say, there are only three ears. You say, a square knot should have four ears. I say, consider the loose ends to be the fourth ear. You, nevertheless, remain dissatisfied. A square has four sides, should not a square flower knot have four ears?