Carol James went to Korea for a couple of weeks and took an intensive course on maedup (매듭) at Dong Lim Knot Museum. Luckily for us, to help herself remember, she’s posted a number of videos to her YouTube channel.

She begins with the double connection (two strand Matthew Walker, 도래매듭, dorae maedup, machine translation: advent):

Then the square flower knot (Chen: cloverleaf, 생쪽매듭, saeng-jjong, Korean: ginger) which she calls a “pinwheel”:

Then a compound dragonfly knot (잠자리매듭, jam-ja-ri) which has the button (knife lanyard, 연봉매듭, yeon-bong, Korean: lotus knot) and the square macrame knot (Chen: flat):

Then a compound, slightly fractal, 4 into 1 square flower knot (가지방석매듭, ga-ji-bang-seong, machine translation: cushion knot) which she calls a “complex pinwheel”:

Then a hexagonal flower knot (chen: round brocade, 매듭매듭, mae-deum) which she calls a “plum blossom knot”:

Lastly the mystic (pan chang, endless knot, 국화매듭, gu-kwa, Korean: chrysanthemum knot):

Translation note: I just had a look at my major Korean knotting links and they are all gone. Now, over the years, these sites have come and gone under various URLs, so one or another might come back. Even the one run by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology is currently gone. Ah!! Found it, they changed the .org to .net, so it’s now at http://www.koreaknots.net/ (nobody cares about link rot anymore). In any case, this set of translations was harvested from a combination of the site just mentioned and a commercial site that existed back in 2002 called crossncross. It may still exist under a different name, but a few searches using their content as search terms didn’t turn them up.

Random thoughts: I’ve been very lax about the link dumps. On only one of my search terms I had accumulated over 500 posts and decided to plow through them yesterday. An initial triage reduced the posts that I should actually click through to read for an actual viewing beyond a title to 91. In another folder the helpful “over 1000” number is not really a good motivating thought…