Knotty Notions - page 16 of 41

Next up yellow and the letter ‘O’. Obviously, for the letter ‘O’ we’d need a round knot. I had two initial thoughts: something big and sunny or a hollow round form. I started with a 8x3 bao knot but it really didn’t want to hold the form (cord too soft? fumble hands?) so I moved on to the 2x12 which had troubles of it’s own. When you have so very many ears with such a large centre, they can disappear on you. The centre loops can easily flip and the ears themselves can disappear into the centre in a confusing way. Also, because the centre is so crowded, it is difficult to make the centre structural loops to sit flat. As you can see, I eventually got the 2x12 bao to behave. More or less. But I’m still not sure I’m happy with it. For one, the yellow is such an intense yellow that it encroaches on orange territory. Two, the crowding still gives it a feeling of… untidiness?

Moving through the rainbow in a predictable Western sort of way (almost google-ish? 8) the letter ‘N’ is orange. I wanted each knot to be from a different knot family as well, and for the nicely straight parts of the ‘N’, the plafond seemed like a good choice. For the corners, something with more built in flexibility would be needed. When I look at the centre of the plafond knot, what I see is the centre of the sauvastika knot. Perhaps this follows logically from the fact that both are built out of interlinked simple overhand knots, but maybe not.

I meant to start last year with this series of knots, but I lost them in the fall move. Being one of those people, I stewed and searched instead of just retying them until late 2009. Of course, when I had retied 1.5 letters I then found the originals. Like wearing a rain coat to ensure that it won’t rain that day, I should have started retying sooner. 8)

So, I had this scrap of wire in my wire working box (cutters, pliers, cup burs, etc) and it was… 20cm long or so. What had I originally cut it for? What had I cut it off of? Dunno, but is it long enough to do anything with? Often when I’ve got some cord scrap in my hands they will do what they so frequently do: flower knots, button knots, double connection, double coin, etc. So, this little bit of wire, could I tie a flower knot in it with some beads? How would it look with such a small gauge of wire?

So, I’m going to the Bay area for Xmas this year and I was thinking: what do I want to do when I go there. Y’know other than shop. 8) And what I thought is that I’d really like to take one of Marion’s workshops. Sure, I could probably experiment and figure out how to do the beaded edging on the donuts or how to get the lovely smoothly aligned yarns on her braids, but why should I? 8)