Happy moo year! It’s the year of the Earth Ox (a couple of years ago, we had to explain to our Chinese teacher why it was not the year of the “cow” or for that matter “sheep” (vs “goat”), “bunny” (vs “rabbit” or “hare”), “mouse” (vs “rat”), or “chicken” (vs “rooster”). 8)

Next up, what I’m calling the corner split variation on the good luck knot. A first glance says that Ms. Chen has, in Chinese, named it something about little ear, blah, blah, variation A. A less casual and more labour intensive translation attempt follows. Here’s the original and a word for character translation (note that a character by character translation misses a lot of nuances, but it’s the best I can do).

小耳翼疊壓吉祥結A型 little ear wing fold pressure lucky/auspicious knot A type/build/model

In any case, I am confident that the little ear wing refers to what I’m calling the corner ears. So, this variation does the first crowning step for the good luck knot, then extends what would be the corner ears and crowns those instead then splitting the loop directly opposite. This is an asymmetrical move and as you might expect, the back (see right) doesn’t match the front.

Edit: when first posted 2 days ago, I named this knot the corner cross variation. I had tied and scanned this bunch of good luck variations years ago and was doing a quick matching of knot to name and method. Today while tying some new knots (and matching old front and back scans together, since they were before I got systematic about the naming) I realized that I’d made a mistake. There was an extra splitting move in this knot. I could probably have left the name as is, but it’s this lack of precision that caused the trouble in the first place, right? So, I’m fixing things…