Let me start with a story. Almost 50 years ago when my mother first arrived in Canada, she was shopping at the grocery store when she was approached by a shop employee. He said that she had been randomly selected to win a year’s worth of groceries if she would answer a simple skill testing question: when is St. Patrick’s day? Well, mom being pretty fresh “off the boat” had no clue and therefore didn’t win the prize. I’d have thought the event would have burned the date into her brain (she certainly tells the story regularly) but when I asked her about it the other day, she still had no clues when St. Patrick’s day was. Oh well.

Here’s a progress shot of black version with the centre bead in place. Pretty, no? 8)

Articles
A series of articles (in English at the link) published in a Spanish art magazine by a German writer (?). The topics range from quipus to computer generated but physical Gordian knots.
http://myvisit.to/franz-ost/langswitch_lang/en

Things to see
Seminal kumihimo author, Catherine Martin, who these days braids with gold and platinum wire studded with diamonds, is one of the featured artists at The Goldsmith’s Company’s Summer Exhibition, Creation II. The show is at the Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, England running from Friday May 29 to Saturday July 11, 2009. Admission is free.
http://www.responsesource.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=46248

Now, each cord you use will have different characterisics unique to that type, and the shoelaces I use for my examples are no where near as slippery as most decorative cord choices, so I had to try this knot again in a more standard cord selection, in this case 3mm nylon satin cord. For a button, I would definitely want to use nylon or polyester over rayon as they are much more durable materials, able to deal with constant handling, wear and tear much more gracefully than rayon. Even so, nylon satin cord is far more slippery than the shoelace, and in order to get proper tension on the centre, pretty much all the slack had to be pulled out of the ears, although strangely enough as can be seen in the pictures, one ear was more stable than the others. Of course, if you tightened carefully and then reinforced the centre structure with thread, you could have larger ears if you wanted to.