Happy New Years and Merry Fun-A-Day 2010!

I've been a little busy lately with grad applications (done! now onto the fafsa... grossss) and other crafty stuff but that doesn't mean I've forsaken Fun-A-Day! (<-- Check out some of the other awesome projects-in-progress at the ArtClash website!)

Fun-A-Day 2010: Knot-A-Day!

Over the summer I met a fantastic artist named Debra Folz who had a contagious infatuation with knots. She had brought a great knot dictionary with her to Haystack and we even used one of the knots on our group project. As the summer wound down a bunch of us decided we wanted to carry the project on into the fall... but... let's just say that none of our momentum stood up to the test of our real lives. Ooops! So when Fun-A-Day rolled around, what better than to pick up where we left off in August?


I actually had kind of a hard time finding a good knot dictionary. The Philadelphia Free Library had alarmingly few and none to my liking... and the internet had surprisingly few diagrams that weren't specifically for camping or fishing. So when I was in Providence last weekend I picked up Deb's dictionary- the same one we had perused so enthusiastically over the summer.



Look at the super cool diagrams!! You know how much I love diagrams... mmmm... Each knot has it's own name and the descriptions are pretty hilarious. Get this one:

"Fig. 60: The Two-Strained Wall or Japanese Granny is formed by walling the strands up through each others parts, as illustrated in PLATE 53, Fig. 2. This is the Japanese method of tying a Granny Knot."

Walling the strands up? What does that even mean?? Nuts. But so much fun!

I love the way the knots kind of look like dna couplets...

My plan is to mount and frame each knot so as to accumulate a collection of well labeled knots for the show in February. How nautical, no? Nineteen days down... I'll keep you updated...