The good luck knot (吉祥結), a name coined by Lydia Chen who wrote the seminal book Chinese Knotting in both Chinese and English, is based on the crown knot. Usually the crown knot is tied in sequence to create a sinnet, a braid composed of knots. The best static (not animated) instructions I have found on the net for the crown sinnets are by The Boondoggle Man who, unfortunately, calls them the square stitch and the circle stitch.
As you can tell from the logo over at The Chinese Knotting Homepage, the good luck knot is one of my favourites.
To the left here started out as an experiment with decorative rope making. I wanted to see if I could duplicate a braided look with twisted rope techniques. The rope side of things worked out (at least to my eyes) but then what to do with it? The good luck knot seemed like a good choice as there is minimal fiddling with the cord during construction for this decorative rope with unknown durability.
To help emphasize the structure of the various knots, to accompany the monochrome example knot, I'm tying versions that are half rainbow and half black. The rainbow colours provide both contrast to the black and an indication of where along the length of the cord being used to tie the knot the various elements of the knot might be.
Similarly for the last knot on the left, a basic black knot is doubled with a rainbow cord.
Terminology
The good luck knot is different from most of the other knots with multiple ears in that there are double the number of ears than the size number of the knot would indicate. The 4-knots here on this page have 8 ears each. 4 short and 4 long. But, of course, ear size is subject to the whims of the knot tyer so basing terminology on that would be foolish. However, notice that what is traditionally the "long" ear comes out of the side of the knot and the "short" ear wraps around the corner of the knot. So, there you have some terminology to deal with the good luck family of knots.
As you can tell from the logo over at The Chinese Knotting Homepage, the good luck knot is one of my favourites.
As mentioned in my review of the globe knot book, my bead group wanted to learn some globe knots so I picked 18JBD for it’s relative simplicity (facet number) and snazzy appearance. Of course, in order to follow the instructions from the book, one is going to need a tool. Since buying the official tool just to try one knot seems little excessive, I came up with a makeshift tool that should cost pennies to construct.
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Lee Valley Tools is a local hardware/gardening/woodworking store. They don’t sell the plants or the wood, but they do sell the tools. They have stores across the country, but somehow it still feels wrong to call it a chain, perhaps because they are still family-owned (I think!).
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