Lately I’ve been working on many different things and for some reason not finishing any of them. sigh

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).

So, I had this scrap of wire in my wire working box (cutters, pliers, cup burs, etc) and it was… 20cm long or so. What had I originally cut it for? What had I cut it off of? Dunno, but is it long enough to do anything with? Often when I’ve got some cord scrap in my hands they will do what they so frequently do: flower knots, button knots, double connection, double coin, etc. So, this little bit of wire, could I tie a flower knot in it with some beads? How would it look with such a small gauge of wire?

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.