I'm taking one of those massive open online courses from Coursera, in particular, the Design class and foolishly decided, as my class project, to work on my current obsession, making a beaded sinnet stand. As part of my class, I'm supposed to gather 5 peers who are experiencing the same problem and interview them (among other things, that will be revealed to me as the class progresses). So, I need your help for my class! More on that at the end of the post.

Last but not least is the nonagonal good luck knot. More accurately Greek vs Latin, the term enneagonon is more “correct”, but nonagon is the more popular and commonly used term. Plus there’s this whole ennegram/enneagram personality thing to confuse matters. Best to stick with nonagon, am I right?!? 8)

Behold the Heptagonal good luck knot. An alternate term for a seven sided figure is septagon, but in an effort to minimize confusion, let’s stick with “heptagon”.

The good luck knot (吉祥結), a name coined by Lydia Chen who wrote the seminal book Chinese Knotting in both Chinese and English, is based on the crown knot. Usually the crown knot is tied in sequence to create a sinnet, a braid composed of knots. The best static (not animated) instructions I have found on the net for the crown sinnets are by The Boondoggle Man who, unfortunately, calls them the square stitch and the circle stitch.