Ey up, everyone.
Trying 1396, I found myself wandering into idle thought.
It, s this:
How , on earth did the author organise his mind, to be able to conceive the path of a single strand?
I tried to figure the odds of doing this , of arriving at a workable template knowing (presumably) what it was that was to be achieved…Needless to say, I didnt get very far with this calculation, for the possible permutations appeared to vastly confusing.
So, how was it done? eh.
I would assume he put in a lot of hours in experimentation, as a matter of course , but, by golly, he must have had someetremely sharp sense of visual memory.
Walrus the Yorkie
Walrus,
That is a convoluted one, for sure. I’m better at regular shapes, myself, but I know it’s possible to have a pretty good idea where you’re going when you start something with an intricate pattern, and I’m also used to seeing people who are better at asymmetrical things than I am, so it makes sense to me that a person who’s worked with the concepts for long enough can just go bumping along over the plowed ground and end up exactly where they want to be, despite everything.
My abilities have been enhanced by study and practice, but I seriously doubt that I’d have ever devoted so much time to those if I hadn’t already been possessed of a strong spatial sense.
Loren
Loren, you have given me even more things to be thought about.
I understand some of the idea of spatiality and asymmetrical layout, but I had quite forgot about the importance of time . and what is possible.
Indeed , I do use the above, in other hobbies.
Still and all, I dont quite have my head around this one, as applied to knotting. Not yet.
It would be of interest to me, to find out if anyone can, perchance, throw a bit more light on how they “experiment” when looking for alternative/ variations on methods of construction…
Oh, as a by- note, I found that 1396 made a lot more visual sense, when it was lifted off the board and bunged onto a cylindrical former…it still needs its final working,though.
Walrus the Yorkie
Walrus,
Some of my ideas came about after I laid them out on graph paper. There are a couple of tricks to that, that I find useful, the main one being the alignment of the knot with the lines of the graph. I used to just mechanically lay out dots across a line, then move down a few lines and put dots on the halfway points, to do a drawing of a Turk’s Head with an odd number of strands. (I just don’t do even ones. I don’t hate them, actually, but even numbers bug me. Sorry, I digress… 
Anyway, now I turn the paper 45 degrees and draw the lines of the knot parallel to the lines of the graph. Let’s see, there might be a page on my site with something like that… yeah, here:
http://www.golden-knots.com/drawingpatterns.html
Notice that the grid is tilted over at an angle, so the knots proceed on the level. I can make any knot that will flow across a sheet of graph paper. There are probably a variety of ways to approach some knots, I usually just fiddle til I get one that works and leave it at that – someone showed me a different way to do one of my continuous sinnets, once, for example.
Loren
And don’t forget that before they made those difficult grids the started with easy ones.
If you work your way through a chapter of ABOK you will see that the knots get more difficult.
Ashley must have used the same way of working up to a difficult grid too. Often the simpler grids are not in the books or on the website, but they have been made in many cases.
Willeke
When I make my grids, I use a computer aided drafting tool called AutoCAD. This is a top-shelf drafting tool, one of many availabe. I have been tying knots for forty years, tying complex Turks Heads in hand without instructions. I started making tools for knots I tied most often out of toilet paper tubes and a marker. When I had a mid life career change, and started drafting, it became obvious to use the drafting to help make the tools.
Computer drafting programs have a built in graph paper. You tell the machine the two points, and it draws a straight line. A point and a radius, and a circle appears. It’s intuitive, point and click. A line will “magnet” into an another line for seamless transitions. I tell the machine line color, line width, scale, hundreds of variables are available. I sit at this machine and draft boats for 8 hours a day, 2 dimensional grids become simple. I have an excelent spatial thought process. I can see where Ashley would have had the same type of spatial memory to remember so many knots.
When I started drafting grids, I taught myself on the easy stuff first. I’m sure Ashley started out the same way. The more you do stuff, the easier it gets. The beauty of the computer is that all my past work is available to reuse. Like a Word document that you use over and over again, changing a name, or address, I reuse drawings. Always adding to them, using past work to determine future outcomes. I save any useful drafting, computer memory is cheap.
When I started drafting Turks Heads, I would tie the knot, and sit at the keyboard designing the grid. I am to a point where I can visualize the knot, and draft it. Then I have to tie it to see what it looks like. This is how I designed the Turks Head chess set that I have posted in my gallery at www.khww.net. The grids are extremely complex, but they have a history of simpler grids.
Pat