Sailors Knot Bracelet

Finals having been last week, I hopefully will be able to get back into a semi-regular updating schedule for the blog. Today's masterpiece: a 'sailor's knot' bracelet. This is a nice DIY because it's super easy and requires only medium-sized rope, electric tape, scissors and a button or large bead. All relatively easy to find around your house, or easy to buy if you don't have them.

to show you what you're making:

This is what we start with: a pile of rope. In order to make this usable, we measure it out. I would suggest doing what you see I did over there ->  Basically, I held the end between my thumb and hand, then looped the rope around my wrist twice, so that where the two ends met made closed the third loop. where they met is where you want to cut.

 Unfortunately, when you cut this stuff, it frays pretty badly if you don't melt it or tape it. I opted for taping, if only because I didn't have a lighter on me. just wrap some electrical tape around the ends, and voila! no more fraying.

This is more or less what the ends should look like. You want to fold it in half at this point as evenly as you can.














Now, you get to do the fun part- you knot it. You can do this with a normal knot like you use to tie your shoes, or you can do a quadruple wrap or a 'sailors knot' (my favorite).

This is a normal knot

This is a quadruple loop

To make a quadruple loop, wrap the rope around your fingers like so, then pull the two ends through, tighten like a normal know, and there we go. It ends up looking like what you see below.

This is a 'Sailor's Knot'. Usually made with two ropes, not one, so that's why this might look slightly different than you expected. But it's still awesome, and does actually still count as a sailors knot. It also happens to be my favorite of the three shown here.

 Once you're done with that, you need to attach the button/bead/whatever you chose to the non-looped end of your bracelet. As you can see, I just used tape to attach my button. However you do it is fine. Once it's attached, you can pull the loop over, and voila! it is finished! see below or above for the final product.