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.

I finally successfully tied and tightened the type 2 hexagonal stellar knot. It’s nice but the centre hole is not as big as I’d hoped. So, it’s back to the standard stellar knot with fewer overlaps, methinks.

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.

I’m trying to start a new tradition/product line. So far I’ve almost carried through the tradition, but nothing on the product line front. What I’d like to be doing is designing a new festive tree ornament kit each year. If you look over at the shop site you’ll notice a distinct lack of ornament kits. It’s all in the timing and that, since I am the Queen of Procrastination, does not work in my favour.