Knotty Notions - page 14 of 41

My entertainment reading of choice is science fiction, fantasy, myths, legends, the occasional light horror if written by a favourite author, that sort of thing. As a general rule I stay out of the romance, mystery, fiction and literature areas of bookstores. I will often be found on the children/youth sections looking for books for the kids as well as myself (I have a particular soft spot for remixed fairy tales). Where knots intersect with fantastic fiction, well, it’s a happy place for me.

In print in one form or another pretty much continuously since 1981, this book is responsible for reviving the art of Chinese knotting and likely many cascade effects.

The easiest way for me to enter Chinese text is by typing English text and getting something to translate it for me. Generally speaking this does 60% of the job. Then there are the characters that are more difficult to translate, so I need to enter them directly. For this task I like to write the characters into a system that does Chinese handwriting recognition. For this job I used the free iTranslate iPhone app and the nciku dictionary. I used the iTranslate app, mostly because I was out, but it had the added advantage of quickly swapping the Chinese and English back and forth from the translate/translated windows for refinement of the desired characters. Also, unlike the other translation apps on my phone, iTranslate allowed me to get the data out (via email in this case). Apparently iTranslate is “powered by Google” and indeed once I got home I also used Google Translate with largely the same results although there is no handwriting recognition involved there.

I want to catalogue my knotty book collection (and braids and any related crafts) and this seems like a good place to do it. Well, the main site is where it should probably end up, but here’s a good place to work on it, I can add curating on the other side.

So, about halfway through, I ran out of the copper wire I was using. I could have gotten more, but I had a spool in the same gauge of magnet wire, which also happened to be reddish. Reddish, festive and xmas-y, although it wouldn’t go very well with the green and purple I was using before, so I changed the base cord colour to white. I was going to use some pink too, but forgot as I got into the flow of construction. The final knot including the hanging thread is in the picture to the left, and to the right is the knot in it’s gift packaging (little organza bags from eBay).