Hemp Jewelry Designs

To add to how much cord do I need post, here are a couple more tips to help you determine cord length.

I have been asked by a faithful reader a couple of good questions to help with deciding on cord length.

“Is there a way to know how -much- more or less chord I should get depending on the knot?”

The answer is yes and no For me, it just took practice and lots of trial and error to get it down to where I was not wasting alot of cord or not having enough cord. I just kept to some guidelines, and went from there.

If you are using a knot that is very ’small’–meaning, there is less cord to use to complete one knot, like the half hitch or the half knot, then you are going to use more cord to finish the piece. Does that make sense?

If you are using a knot that is ‘larger’–meaning, there is more cord needed to complete one knot, then you might not need as much cord to finish the piece of jewelry.

Let me do a for example to see if I can explain it a little bit better.

If you are making a piece of jewelry using ..oh lets say the pretzel knot, we KNOW that it will take a lot of cord to make the actually knot itself, and the knot will also take up a larger space in the design, which means less knots need to create it, meaning probably less cord will be needed. Hmmm, maybe that is confusing or not a good example.

On the other hand, if we are going to use the half hitch knot to make a necklace, we KNOW this is a simple knot and one knot is finished using very little cord, so it is going to take a lot of knots to finish the piece. Therefore, we will need more cord for this knot.

Try this experiment to see if it will help you see what I mean.

Let’s make two pieces of jewelry. One with just half knots, and one with the switch knot. We want the jewelry size to be the same size when finished, so you can see how much cord you used with both experiments. I am just pulling numbers out, hopefully this will work.

1. Cut 4 cords, 2 for knotters and 2 for knot bearers
2. Length of all cords cut at 25 inches.
3. Tie overhand knot but leave about 2 inches on the ends before you start your knotting

Ok, work with the first piece of jewelry and just make half knots for about 4 inches.  Make the ending overhand knot and set this aside.

Do the second piece of jewelry and just use the switch knot, and knot until you get 4 inches done, the end with a overhand knot.

Compare your two pieces of jewelry. See how much more cord was needed for the first one? How much cord do you have left over at the end? Compare it to the second one.

Did this experiment even work for you? lol.  Maybe I was just too long winded to say that there really isn’t a magic formula to know how much more or less cord to use depending on the knot, I wish there was, and if there is I don’t know it.

I will have to wait on the second question and answer as I over ‘talked’ in this one!

Any questions? comments? Let me know. If I confused you all to heck, well…I apologize lol.

Happy Knotting

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.