In the news
At an event remembering the 228 incident in Taiwan, a ceremony involving a symbolic (and physical) knot did not go as planned when the participants were unable to untie the knot.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2009/03/01/2003437296
http://www.examiner.com/x-1969-Boston-Progressive-Examiner~y2009m3d1-Taiwan-President-Ma-is-heckled-by-228-Massacre-protesters-in-Taipei-ceremonies

So, my one month blogiversary give away tassel is incomplete and late for which I apologize, but then you are late too. Despite Google Analytics telling me that there are about 100 of you who have visited the site more than 100 times (which is interesting because there’s only about 60 blog postings), no one left a comment on the original blogiversary posting, so were it done I would have had to keep it in any case.

Pretty Pictures
I am subscribed to a number of braiding/kumihimo mailing lists, but for one reason or another have not been reading them for most of a year now. Which, of course, means that they’ve been building up in an unmanageable mass waiting for me. I’ve been trying to chip away at them now that I’ve decided I should in my usual manner (try to keep current and plow through a minimum number of old messages while I’m at it, eventually I’ll be completely caught up until the next time I go out of town or whatever). So, some of the links I’m posting here are quite old. Them’s the breaks.

While the flower knot, when considered as a polygonal knot, is a family unto itself with many (many!) variations starting with the number of petals (ears) and the ways that the structural loops interlace, the basic square flower knot is also the basic unit of the mystic knot (see right). Now flower knots can be chained together via their ears as in the case of the ru-yi knot, but if you instead extend the structural loops and weave through them appropriately, you begin to build up a mystic knot.

In the next post, I’ll illustrate the relationship, but for now let me just say that the square form of the flower knot (see right) is the basic unit of the mystic knot (see left). The Ashley Book of Knots (also known as Ashley’s or ABoK) has much to say on the topic of mystic knots, but not in those words (Ashley calls this knot family the Chinese butterfly knots), so let’s extract them and put them in one post for easy reference, shall we? I’m making pronouncements based on visual inspection and could easily be wrong, I’ll tie them and post the pictures later, correcting as I go if necessary…