In Chinese Knotting 3, two variations of the plafond knot are explored, the first is the horizontal plafond knot 横藻井結 (橫藻井结) [héng zǎo jǐng jié]. In this configuration, looking somewhat like a cross between the sauvastika and the plafond knot, I wondered what manipulations would work. The side loops, if too short would pull into the body of the knot and the whole thing would fall apart, but the top loop can’t just pull in. With the top loop shortened, it looks like this:

In print in one form or another pretty much continuously since 1981, this book is responsible for reviving the art of Chinese knotting and likely many cascade effects.

The easiest way for me to enter Chinese text is by typing English text and getting something to translate it for me. Generally speaking this does 60% of the job. Then there are the characters that are more difficult to translate, so I need to enter them directly. For this task I like to write the characters into a system that does Chinese handwriting recognition. For this job I used the free iTranslate iPhone app and the nciku dictionary. I used the iTranslate app, mostly because I was out, but it had the added advantage of quickly swapping the Chinese and English back and forth from the translate/translated windows for refinement of the desired characters. Also, unlike the other translation apps on my phone, iTranslate allowed me to get the data out (via email in this case). Apparently iTranslate is “powered by Google” and indeed once I got home I also used Google Translate with largely the same results although there is no handwriting recognition involved there.

小耳翼疊壓吉祥結E型 little ear wing fold pressure lucky/auspicious knot E type/build/model Type 5 Good Luck Knot with Small Outer Loops