Now the illustration/instructions for Ashley #589 is of the line and circle (indicating unders) variety. It is extremely difficult to visualize from that, especially for a knot of this complexity. He recommends enlarging the diagram and pinning everything down very carefully. Well, I was winging it freehand, and I’m pretty sure it’s not right, at least the “back side” looks like there’s a mistake (see right). The “front” side on the other hand, looks reasonable except that the loose ends extending through the loops are back to front versus front to back as in the diagram.

Clearly I need to try this again at some point with more dedication and precision.

Still, it looks like a lot of twisty gymnastics just to get one more ear and a closed one at that.

Note: Now I was debating scanning in the Ashley illustrations so that I wouldn’t need to blather quite so much and still give a horribly muddy idea of what I was talking about, but besides the laziness, I’m tying quite a few knots (in sequence, no less) from the book and I don’t want to hear any whining (official or otherwise) about copyright. At some point, eventually, I’ll do my own instructions. This book is (or should be) in pretty much every library of reasonable size (or available through inter-library loan). It’s also very easy to pick up from the online booksellers. Not to mention that there are lots of PDFs (scans of the entire book) that are floating around the ‘net, free for the downloading. So, even though I’d probably be within my fair-use rights to scan and post the illustrations, I’m not going to, for now.

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