Knots research

I've done a bunch of research about knots over the past few weeks for use in the the firebird story.  It's way too much research considering I'm doing it for at most four paragraphs in a chapter that I've been considering cutting.  It's probably a sign that I've been procrastinating on other things.

Oh well!  I learned some cool things and I'm here today to share them with you.

Turk's Head Knots

A Turk's Head Knot is a decorative knot tied around a stake or flattened out into a mat.  It gets its name from how it looks like a turban if you don't understand how turbans work.  The boy scouts use it as a woggle, a knot that holds their bandanna-neckerchiefs in place, and people will often put it on either end of their larger decorative knot pieces to hide the loose ends.

mat 3 lead-7 bight doubled

The neat thing about Turk's Head Knots is that they can be expanded to suit your needs.  By changing the number of bights (the number of arcs in the top or around the outside in mat form) you can change the circumference.  By increasing the number of leads (the number of strands around the circumference) you can make the knot thicker or taller depending on how you want to think about it.

5 lead-4 bight doubled

4 lead-5 bight doubled

The real kicker for me (math incoming) is that you can't just have any combination of leads and bights.  If you're working with one rope, the knot will only work if the number of leads and the number of bights are co-prime, meaning that their greatest common factor is 1.  So you can make a 3 lead-5 bight or a 7 lead-4 bight or a 9 lead-16 bight, but you can't make a 4 lead-6 bight (with a greatest common factor of 2) or a 3 lead-9 bight (with a greatest common factor of 3).  If you want to make those knots you need to work with multiple strands of rope (2 strands for the 4 lead-6 bight where the greatest common factor is 2, or 3 strands for the 3 lead-9 bight where the greatest common factor is 3.)

Braids and Sennits

Braids and sennits are basically interchangeable words.  A sennit is a series of knots repeated to make a pattern, which is what a braid is.  I set out in my survey of sennits to find something in particular.  I wanted a braid that used 3 strands, isn't the same old standard braid I've seen eighty million times, and uses all three strands equally, or in other words doesn't have a knot-bearing cord.  Turns out that this is a difficult set of criteria.

Basic three strand braid, Chain Sennit, four strand French Sennit, four strand Square Sennit

The fancier the braid, the more strands it uses, so a bunch of cool looking ones have four strands or five strands or eight strands.  I was looking for something with three strands because a three-strand rope--you guessed it--has three strands, and this kind of rope can easily be unlayed into three separate strands then layed back into one.

Diamond Braid, Crown Sennit, four strand sennit

Here are more that use four strands.  These stitches are often used when making lanyards at summer camp, so this was pretty fun, even if my knots look pretty crummy made out of yarn.

braid with knot-bearing cord, Solomon Bar, Half-hitch Sennit

These use a knot-bearing cords, witch is a strand that stays straight as you tie your knot around it.  They are the red strings in the picture.  Since the knot-bearing cord doesn't get knotted, you end up using a lot less length than you do for the knotting cords.  My issue with this is that if you send a bolt of magic down all three strands at once, it's going to move a lot faster down the knot-bearing cord while it lags behind running through all the twists of the knotting cords.

However, I do research not just to get specific vocabulary, but also to find out if what I have in mind will work.  With the lack of three strand braids, I think I need to change what I had in mind and use a Solomon Bar.  These are pretty cool.  They're also called Cobra Knots or a Square Knot Sennit.