To start a 4 sided good luck knot, fold your cord in half and put it down, then pull 2 arms out of the side to make a plus (+) shape. The longer your arms, the easier they are to control and, obviously, the more working length you need for your cord. While the surface you’re working on is likely to have more friction than a polished scanner glass, even so the cord can still get pretty unruly like the picture to the left.

A beginner is likely to want use some techniques or tools to control the centre. A popular choice would be a board with pins. The most obvious for many would be your hand. Simply make a loose fist and pull bights of cord through the available spaces.
I once tied an 8 sided good luck knot in my hand to prove to myself that I could, but in general I like to use paper templates as shown in the snowflake post.

Another of my favourites would be to use bobby pins to supplement your hands as shown to the right.

At some point a full how-to for the good luck knots will be written up for The Chinese Knotting Homepage (that’s a “mouthful” would CKH be better?), so I’m not going to tackle it on the blog, at least for now. Plus you can always go here or here until then.

The theme for the next while is variations on the good luck knot and one of the simplest is to change the loose ends of your knot from the usual side to a corner (as defined in the Good Luck Basics post). In effect, rotating the knot 45°. Altering the way it connects to other knots in a design. To do this, simply change the starting layout to 4 bights instead of 3 and the loose ends. “What happens with the loose ends?” you might ask. You tie the knot as per usual using the 4 bights, sort of ignoring the loose ends, but tighten very cautiously, being careful not to pull the loose ends through the knot. When both crowns are snugged up, you’ll be done and the loose ends won’t go anywhere. Tah dah!

Administrivia Faithful regular readers (all 20 of you? 8) will have noticed that the last 2 posts weren’t exactly first posted when the time stamp on the site says they were. It’s true, I fell behind and failed in my daily posting goal. But why cheat? Why not ‘fess up and let it go? I did consider that. The idea was very tempting, but the problem is: I know if I did that it would be the start to the slippery slope of procrastination with which I am all too familiar, and the next thing you know it would have been 2 months between fresh posts. So spiritually (if not actually 8), I’m still on track and making new posts every day. Think of it this way: it’s not you I’m trying to lie to! 8)