I’ve added a new tag for Knots in the News:

I was playing around with a variety of Google “products” and discovered a way to selectively share and annotate links for public viewing that doesn’t expose you, my gentle Knotty Notion reader, to silly cat and dog pictures and such that I subject my friends to (or cause my friends to wade through endless knot and braid posts for my thoughts on the latest installment of mad scientist cartoons).

Using the Korean keyboard on my iPhone (much nicer than anything I could quickly find online for free), I am able to type the name of the knot I found, and the name of the book I found it in. Let’s start with the knot: 당초매듭 (dang-cho-mae-deup) which machine translates as “initially the knot” or “initial knot” a translation that lacks both poetry and, I suspect, gist. But, searching with “당초매듭” finds us this web page: http://blog.daum.net/_blog/BlogView.do?blogid=0BoQ2&articleno=7147932&categoryId=#ajax_history_home which, after I turned off a few security settings, shows us… a creeper knot! Jackpot!

So, I was looking through my Japanese and Korean books looking for creeper and double coin references and came across what looks like a creeper reference in “한국매듭” which I’ll blog more about when I figure out how to type Korean (or I could do what I did to get this book title onto the computer which is look at a page of related text and pick out characters to cut and paste together). Then I had a look at my copy of Elegant Knotted Jewelry by Becky Meverden and there were double coin knots and romanized Korean: “nalgae”. Sounded plausible. Sounded familiar… Checking out my maedup translation grid we see nalgae is the name of the sauvastika knot. It’s a wing knot, but it’s a dragonfly wing, not a butterfly wing. sigh A search of Google Images bears that out.

Finished adding text to the scanned step-by-step images for the creeper knot. A relatively lonely knot in the Chinese knotting pantheon, it seems to have been not embraced by Japanese or Korean artisans (I have found no mentions and hence no translations). Even Ashley has no mention of it although I did find an extension, the caterpillar knot.