No way to tell if grey or black will go better with those hexagonal beads but to do it. Plus, if I give one away then I can keep the other one. That or give it away for the next thing…

In any case, this is a progress shot. I’ve already started to put knots together with beads and I’m liking the grey, but the little beads should maybe be bigger. We’ll see how it looks when it’s done.

As previously mentioned, I decided to tie the hexagonal type 2 stellar knot with my nice and graphic shoelace in hopes of gaining insight as to what exactly was going wrong. As you can see from the picture to the left, I didn’t succeed in tying the knot any better with the shoelace, but I did gain insight:

With those nice hexagonal beads, I wanted to frame them with a hexagonal knot. It didn’t need to be particularly stable as I’d be reinforcing the central area with thread (and more beads), so likely I’d be taking a hexagonal knot and reduce the amount of overlapping an favour of a bigger centre hole, the better to display the framed bead rather than hide it. Looking through Lydia Chen’s third book, I decided on the “Type 2 Compound Constellation Knot” which unlike your basic hexagonal stellar knot (which is uouu) has a structural loop path of uuouo. At this point I’ve tied it about 6-7 times and each time it looks… funny. As usual with a new polygonal knot, it’s the last interlacing pass on the back side that’s tricky.

The hexagonal (6-sided) good luck knot. The same knot as my 2008 Xmas ornament. Take your cord and make a 6-pointed star shape with the bights (with the free ends being the 6^th point) and do two 2-over crown (overlap 2 arms rather than 1) for a nice tight centre. Depending on your cord (or wire or whatever), you are unlikely to want to tie a regular (1-over) as the structure would be too loose. But try it yourself and see for the experience. 8)

This particular instance is analogous to the rotated square good luck variant as the ends are coming out of corner ears versus side ears.