You see the pictures of Korean braiding stands from time to time. The hard core Korean knot tyers braid their own cord. It’s a beautiful piece of machinery and just as a sculptural object, nifty looking. I have yearned after one for years.

I was working on the main page for the mystic knot and decided that I really needed to have my own illustration of the ru-yi knot (如意, rúyì, halfway between a 장고매듭, jang-go-mae-deup, and a 가지방석매듭, ga-ji-bang-seong-mae-deup).

Knot in Korean (romanized), maedup or maedeup. Po-tae-toe po-tah-toe or more accurately Beijing vs Peking. I first saw it as maedup and still see it as that from time to time, it’s shorter, I like short. Brevity is good. When I’m copying something down and it’s written as maedeup, I’ll copy it that way though. So, no consistency. Sorry.

I had just finished going through a big stack of videos that I had found on youku, a youTube-like site in China (search for Chinese knotting:中国结 and knotting art:结艺) when my knot (매듭 in Korean) search brought me a practical knot result. That’s ok. I’ve got nothing against practical things and it’s not like that automated search turns up many results in general, but it got me to thinking, how to refine this search to produce a more focused decorative result? Taking another look at Kim Hee-Jin’s maedup site and Korean Traditional Knots and started parsing down this string “한국의 전통매듭” which as a string translates to “Korea’s traditional knot”. Previously, I had determined that “매듭” means “knot” so that left the “전통” part. Traditional, eh?

South Korean ssamzisarang has been posting videos about Korean culture. They look somewhat like short segments from TV (interstitials?), but original or not, the video compression was dialed way up, at least on the good luck (chrysanthemum) knot video. The soundtracks on the videos are kinda distracting which makes me think that they are not professional productions, but I could easily be wrong.