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.

As previously mentioned I was having some St. Patrick’s day thoughts earlier in the year. The key thing is that I definitely wanted to have heart shaped leaves. I was thinking to perhaps extend the structural part of the leaves directly into the centre of the compound knot, but ran out of time this year.

Then, as a design consideration, I had recently read something where someone mentioned “luck of the Irish” or shamrocks or… and illustrated it with the photo of a lovely 4 leaf clover (alas, I’ve long since forgotten the source of this). Then someone Irish scathingly rebuked them for using a 4 leaf clover instead of the proper 3 leaf clover. So, even though I think the 4 leaf version is more successful as a design (at least this year!), here’s both.

The 3 leaf stem is what I call the half-connection or a half 2 strand Matthew Walker or a simple snake sinnet (I think Suzen Millodot’s snake knot includes some looping back to the previous knot, but my version doesn’t and I’ve misplaced my copy of her first book (what else is new?)).

The 4 leaf stem is a phoenix tail sinnet, something very like a crochet chain but with 2 loops being worked at once instead of just one.

Entirely independently, IWOM has also posted a knotted shamrock in honour of the day. Ya think if I issued a challenge we could get a bunch of people involved next year? 8)

Books mentioned in this post:

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