I love this resource. So many useful knots. Particularly I like the lanyard / friendship knot [1] and the midshipman's hitch (adjustable slip hitch) [2], the latter of which is probably about 90% of the knots that I tie. Honorable mention to the constrictor knot for attaching to large cylinders [3].
Well, you used it incorrectly. It's clearly for a very specific set of circumstances:
> The Midshipman’s Hitch Knot is promoted by Ashley (ABOK # 1993, p 325) as the only knot to tie in the following unlikely but critical circumstance: you fall overboard and catch hold of the line which you have prudently left trailing astern and find yourself hanging on with difficulty. Before you tire, you manage to bring the bitter end of the rope around your back. You then have to tie a suitable knot to make a loop around you. A bowline cannot be tied under load. Two Half Hitches will slide and constrict you. The Rolling Hitch is the answer. Even as the second turn is tucked “up” into the correct place, the major strain is taken and the final Half Hitch can be tied with less urgency.
Nope, that knot is useful surprisingly often! It's the only applicable knot in that contrived single-handed-sailing-overboard situation, but it's also an effective knot when pitching a tent or tarp, or when hanging a clothesline, or when securing e.g. a canopy against the wind.
Yes, it's a great default adjustable knot! The other one I think is worth knowing is the "adjustable grip hitch", which is like the midshipman's but the half-hitch goes on the other side of the turns. This latter one seems to hold a lot tighter once dressed, even in relatively slippy rope, but unlike the midshipman's it can't easily be tied under load.
Taut Line Hitch is a little different from Midshipman's Hitch. Midshipman's grips a little better and is recommended. However, Like the other reply to your answer, for me the best of them is the Adjustable Grip Hitch. I teach knots to boy scouts, and know lots of them. After using the Adjustable, I don't use the Taut Line or Midshipman's anymore.
One of the things I've learned from teaching knots to Boy & Girl Scouts in the BSA is that you must constantly re-learn them or your skills will founder. It's not like riding a bike for me. That could be a visual-spacial memory thing, but many of my co-knot-tieing scouting teachers seem to have the same experience... so this site is perennially useful.
Favorite knot (involving a Rabbit going "through the hole, around the tree, and back down the hole"): Bowline Knot
My memory of them often vanishes within hours or days...
Except for tying shoes (A doubly slipped reef knot, where a reef knot is left over right and right over left which makes a knot tidy and tight)
And the Uni-knot, even though I've never fished:
A jester offends the king and fears he will executed, and so decides to kill an evil beholder, also called an eye-tyrant, to win back favor.
He charges into the cave and stabs it through the eye, but gets scared and runs away. Coming out he remembers if he doesn't do something, he's dead anyway. Going back, he finds it dead, and he has time to take a long and winding road back, going around his journeys on the inside of his mind.
Having learned from this he decides neither the rashness that got him in the mess nor the cowardice that made him run was any way to live, and this is why the uni-knot can use its power wisely and will not cut itself when tied in Spectra.
And the highwayman's hitch which tells the story of two outlaws and a failed robbery. They're going to tunnel under the bank wall, but they see a hole in the plan. One(Representing one side of the rope) sticks his head up and he had an idea to fix it. The other one sees yet another flaw, and sticks his head in.
Unfortunately, they overlooked one small thing, the cops are waiting, and all it takes is one pull to unravel this complicated scheme and they go to jail.
It takes a long time to find the story hidden in the knots, but once you do, you are relying a lot less on spatial intelligence or muscle memory, and it becomes something you can actually learn and teach without needing access to an entirely new mode of thought and learning that doesn't make any sense to people who don't really have it and probably takes a long time to develop before you can even start learning the knots themselves.
Oh I'm pretty sure most people know plenty of knots but don't even think about it. Many knots are useful, but a list off the top of my head in order of how often they come up for me is: overhand knot, clove hitch, butterfly bend, figure eight knot, cleat hitch, slip knot, bowline knot, and trucker's hitch.
I'm certain I skipped many but those are the ones I feel are most common to doing anything useful with a rope. The trucker's hitch and bowline are the ones that can save your life, but the rest are everyday knots that you might already know except for their names. For example, I don't even know what the shoe tying knots are named but everyone knows those.
>One of the things I've learned from teaching knots to Boy & Girl Scouts in the BSA is that you must constantly re-learn them or your skills will founder.
I dont know, the 3 different ways to tie a clove hitch is documented on here, which is good start, but the one that was engrained in me was clove hitch loops, although their animation makes it even harder to understand.
They should have some hands holding the rope showing the 1st and 3rd person perspective position of the rope in the hands and the position of the hands when tying some knots. So much easier to understand.
I really do wonder about the standard of teaching sometimes.
Probably fastest most reliable knot to have that can be slung over a spar end in a hurry.
That bowline knot story was taught in cubs, perhaps useful for young minds, but does it get forgotten in adulthood as a result? I certainly had forgotten that story until you reminded me.
I'll also credit the Red Cross at being best at teaching me knots and lashings.
I've been using this website for at least a decade, so maybe I'm just used to it, but the clove hitch formed with loops is very easy to follow for me. All the animations are super clear, which is why I use the site. It's consistently easier to follow than most YouTube videos.
I'm not sayings hard to follow, but when you have been shown a very easy way to do a clove hitch, the key being how to hold the rope and your hands, ie the limited movements you have to go through to do a clove hitch, you can do them in your sleep.
We used them as the starter knot before lashing someone down on a stretcher before carrying them out of a disaster zone. It was quite fun, putting the stretcher up on its end or turning it upside down to demonstrate how well protected someone is once lashed to a stretcher.
I like the effort and organisation of the website though, so I'm not knocking it, just pointing out it could be improved with video's that show 1st and 3rd person perspective of hands tying knots. That way, when abseiling, rock climbing or doing other Fred Dibnah style activities, you know if your knots have been tied properly or not.
So much trust is placed on people who run these activities, its nice to have piece of mind, but its probably one of the reasons why the carabiner was invented.
A number of years back I decided I needed to learn to tie more than just an overhand knot. Of the handful I learnt, the bowline (along with the clove hitch) is by far the most used. It's amazing how much easier life can be knowing a couple of basic knots.
I used to use the bowline knot all the time, but have switched to the Perfection Loop Knot, since it doesn’t put right-angle tension on the rope and leave the end of the rope in the loop. https://www.animatedknots.com/perfection-loop-knot
I’m just sharing a useful knot and not trying to get into a Vim vs. Emacs type argument or anything.
I'd be thrilled if I could just remember the names of the knots that suit various common use cases. Then I'd at least be able to google them to find out how to tie them.
Now I'll find myself in a position where I know there's a knot that solves the problem I have, but don't know how to describe it well enough to even search.
A solution would be to dramatically reduce the number you try to keep in mind. Bowline, two half hitches and trucker's hitch might be enough, if all you're doing is tying stuff into a trailer or a car.
Good list. As someone who sails, I'd add either a Magnus hitch or a rolling hitch to that list (preference, really -- both will get you there, but a Magnus is easier depending on where the load is how breakable you want the knot to be) and call it a day.
There is an app called grog knots which I think is made by the same people. Best few bucks I’ve ever spent for an app. Love having a bunch of knot diagrams handy when I’m out trying to do something.
I came here to recommend this. Absolutely worth the 1-time $4.99-no-subscription-or-account-or-any-BS payment.
They made a cool thing. It is valuable to me. I paid for it, and we're done.
The app downloads once and doesn't need an internet connection. If you drew a Venn diagram of "Times I want to Know How to Tie a Specific Type of Knot" and "Times When I Am Out of Cellphone Range", there would be significant overlap between the two circles.
I'm not a particularly good follower of technical diagrams, but I find the instructions to be very clear and easy to follow. It's rare that I don't get a knot right the first time.
I've secured tarps, tents, clothes lines, gear onto vehicles and (most recently) a mountain bike that was missing its rear suspension, all thanks to this app.
EDIT: I forgot about the fishing knots. No matter how good the app is as a resource, I always get confused and frustrated by fishing knots. But I also get confused and frustrated by fishing, so I can't really blame the app for this.
It says it's not available for my device. I've got a 3 year old android phone. Has it maybe not been updated recently enough? I used to have the app when it was free way back when. On an Ipod touch because I didn't have a smartphone back then.
why do you think it's silly?
The offline functionality could have been implemented with the website too.
I don't see any benefit in this use case for an app. But it has the downside that an app has possibilities to screw my system or track me unnoticed. So if you do not need special native features and you are not a computationally expensive product, please built a good offline capable website and not an app.
Please tell me where the app has "it's uses" here?
> But it has the downside that an app has possibilities to screw my system or track me unnoticed
How is it going to screw your system? And just disallow running in background, disallow internet access if you are on mobile. I don't want to fiddle around with my browser when I can install a light-weight app.
Not everyone is a "wow all apps very scary" person
and note the comment above by someone else about camping without Internet access.
If I were installing a knot app and it required enrolling me in their Knot Tying Social Network, I'd uninstall. In fact, if it couldn't run in Airplane Mode, I'd uninstall it.
Why is it silly? Because knot tying is about as harmless as it gets. This isn't the Twitter or LinkedIn app. From my memory of when I had one of these apps, it didn't even ask for my name.
People like making apps, and users seem to like them, too. Grow up.
What does this have to do with my argument? Maybe it's less likely to screw my system intentionally then, but it might still track me. How do you know the app is not as bad as Twitter or LinkedIn?
> People like making apps, and users seem to like them, too. Grow up.
I am just showing a path to an alternate better future. If you don't like questioning the status quo because you think everybody is currently happy, fine. But asking me to grow up because I am worried about corporations having more access to my devices than they need seems unfair.
In this case, a web app is hardly going to help me when I’m camping with no internet connection. But a native app with good offline support is exactly what I would want.
And while web apps have plenty of practical benefits, those are mostly from the perspective of the developer. As a user, once an app is downloaded, good native apps are preferable just about every time.
I am chartering a yacht in two weeks and have been busy re-learning how to tie a core set of knots. This is easily the best resource that I have been using with the rest of the crew(aka family)!
I know the linked site in the submission is more about practical knots, everyday knots, but this Tom Scott guest video from Up and Atom on mathematical knots blew my mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eVd2Ugk9BU
So awesome that it's able to mathematically quantify knots.
My favorite animated knot video is the Ylvis one on the Trucker's Hitch[1] but for the iPhone, Grogg Knots is my go to app if I forget a knot. Of course I find out this web site is the "web" version of that App :-)
I personally found the low frame rate stop motion-esque animations on this hard to follow when learning knots a few months back. Simple close-up videos on YouTube served me better.
Cool website. When I was a teenager, I spent a week every summer learning to sail at a sailing course. So, I learned quite a few of those knots. This brings back good memories. As, I'm Dutch, the names for these knots in English are a bit challenging for me. And honestly, after 35 years, I struggle to name a lot of these knots in Dutch now. But I still know and use a few occasionally. A lot of that becomes muscle memory. If you do use them often enough, it kind of sticks. They are like nice little 3D puzzles and there's something satisfying when you figure out how they work. It can be fun to figure a few out while fiddling with a bit of rope.
The practicality of knots and their traits is what drives their use. When you deal with boats, you need these knots to perform and not come undone when you are not expecting them to (which could be dangerous). And you also need them come apart when you need them to.
Properties like that are what makes a lot of these knots so useful. Technically, you can get by with knowing only a handful. But there are a lot of specialized one with niche usages.
> This brings back good memories. As, I'm Dutch, the names for these knots in English are a bit challenging for me.
I finally got around to doing my day skipper last year and on the course was a Russian who spoke English perfectly fluently but struggled with the technical terms that the rest of us took for granted. It probably doesn't help that sailing is one of those sports where the difference in terminology between British and American English is sometimes significant, for example I don't think the term 'kicking strap' is used in the US.
The knots I use most often even outside of sailing are the bowline and the round turn and two half hitches.
As a younger I became obsessed with trying to make a Monkey's Fist from having heard about one from a Leave it to Beaver episode (a rerun on TV, please, I'm not that old). I had to figure it out myself though.
There is a very nice animation on the site for the Monkey's Fist (where I just now learned the finishing touch to deal with the loose end of the line).
As a fly angler, in addition to the practicality of a given knots purpose and use is the practicality of implementing it in different conditions. There is often a lot of additional “tribal knowledge” on some of these knots, like the clinch knot is great but tying it with some hemostats speeds the process up and is easier when standing in a river. There is a great trick for tying a blood knot which makes it easy whereas doing it from the website would be nearly impossible outside in the weather.
There's a certain kind of sci-fi premise of "what if every intelligent species has something they're particularly good at."
Naturally, most stories revolve around something impressive (or damning) for humanity like "war" or "kindness", but in the past I've wondered what kind of story one could make if the answer was "knots".
Perhaps that's a question for mathematicians, and whether some facility for topological knot-thinking might be very handy in some kind of physics or engineering.
I love the idea of technologically superior aliens showing up and kicking themselves for never having discovered rope. Here, have the ftl drive, we need this rope. Maybe their native habitat didn't have fibrous plants.
I thought for a second that I'd see 3D animation of knots and thought "that'd be a cool math program to do: one that can animate a knot construction"...
This was quite helpful during my early climbing days. It's a shame that sometimes you just can't beat a YouTube video with someone tying the knot you're trying to learn.
I must have saved upwards of 10 minutes so far by tying my laces with the Ian Knot [1]. If anyone knows of a faster knot I’m all ears, otherwise, cheers to Ian and his innovation in the shoe lace knot space.
Not just time saving, but since I use it I did not have to re-tie my laces during the day, it looks very symmetrical, and I regularly have the silly but satisfying experience of people seeing me tie my shoes and say "how did you do that?". This is the knot I am teaching my kids (my wife can take care of the "standard" one).
How do you keep the tension when tying that? With a regular shoelace knot, I have a spare thumb to place on the base knot so that it maintains the tension I initially selected with the base knot. With the Ian knot, it feels like I just get whatever it feels like giving me.
From the elusive message, I guess you mean BDSM or something like that. Are they really specific knots used by people that like to tie each other though?
There's a guy who does youtube videos on Paracord braids and the like. Excellent instructions, but I got kind of a sexual vibe off of it between the music and the way he handled the paracord. All the videos show are his hands and the cord, nothing weird at all. Always thought something was off about it and then found out he's big into restraint or whatever you call the bdsm stuff where people get tied up. Made a lot of sense after that. Still love his videos.
105 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] thread[1] https://www.animatedknots.com/lanyard-knot
[2] https://www.animatedknots.com/midshipmans-hitch-knot
[3] https://www.animatedknots.com/constrictor-knot-twisting-meth...
> The Midshipman’s Hitch Knot is promoted by Ashley (ABOK # 1993, p 325) as the only knot to tie in the following unlikely but critical circumstance: you fall overboard and catch hold of the line which you have prudently left trailing astern and find yourself hanging on with difficulty. Before you tire, you manage to bring the bitter end of the rope around your back. You then have to tie a suitable knot to make a loop around you. A bowline cannot be tied under load. Two Half Hitches will slide and constrict you. The Rolling Hitch is the answer. Even as the second turn is tucked “up” into the correct place, the major strain is taken and the final Half Hitch can be tied with less urgency.
I learned it as the "Taut Line Hitch."
https://www.animatedknots.com/adjustable-grip-hitch-knot
https://www.animatedknots.com/blakes-hitch-knot
Favorite knot (involving a Rabbit going "through the hole, around the tree, and back down the hole"): Bowline Knot
Except for tying shoes (A doubly slipped reef knot, where a reef knot is left over right and right over left which makes a knot tidy and tight)
And the Uni-knot, even though I've never fished:
A jester offends the king and fears he will executed, and so decides to kill an evil beholder, also called an eye-tyrant, to win back favor.
He charges into the cave and stabs it through the eye, but gets scared and runs away. Coming out he remembers if he doesn't do something, he's dead anyway. Going back, he finds it dead, and he has time to take a long and winding road back, going around his journeys on the inside of his mind.
Having learned from this he decides neither the rashness that got him in the mess nor the cowardice that made him run was any way to live, and this is why the uni-knot can use its power wisely and will not cut itself when tied in Spectra.
And the highwayman's hitch which tells the story of two outlaws and a failed robbery. They're going to tunnel under the bank wall, but they see a hole in the plan. One(Representing one side of the rope) sticks his head up and he had an idea to fix it. The other one sees yet another flaw, and sticks his head in.
Unfortunately, they overlooked one small thing, the cops are waiting, and all it takes is one pull to unravel this complicated scheme and they go to jail.
It takes a long time to find the story hidden in the knots, but once you do, you are relying a lot less on spatial intelligence or muscle memory, and it becomes something you can actually learn and teach without needing access to an entirely new mode of thought and learning that doesn't make any sense to people who don't really have it and probably takes a long time to develop before you can even start learning the knots themselves.
I'm certain I skipped many but those are the ones I feel are most common to doing anything useful with a rope. The trucker's hitch and bowline are the ones that can save your life, but the rest are everyday knots that you might already know except for their names. For example, I don't even know what the shoe tying knots are named but everyone knows those.
I dont know, the 3 different ways to tie a clove hitch is documented on here, which is good start, but the one that was engrained in me was clove hitch loops, although their animation makes it even harder to understand.
They should have some hands holding the rope showing the 1st and 3rd person perspective position of the rope in the hands and the position of the hands when tying some knots. So much easier to understand.
I really do wonder about the standard of teaching sometimes.
Probably fastest most reliable knot to have that can be slung over a spar end in a hurry.
That bowline knot story was taught in cubs, perhaps useful for young minds, but does it get forgotten in adulthood as a result? I certainly had forgotten that story until you reminded me.
I'll also credit the Red Cross at being best at teaching me knots and lashings.
We used them as the starter knot before lashing someone down on a stretcher before carrying them out of a disaster zone. It was quite fun, putting the stretcher up on its end or turning it upside down to demonstrate how well protected someone is once lashed to a stretcher.
I like the effort and organisation of the website though, so I'm not knocking it, just pointing out it could be improved with video's that show 1st and 3rd person perspective of hands tying knots. That way, when abseiling, rock climbing or doing other Fred Dibnah style activities, you know if your knots have been tied properly or not.
So much trust is placed on people who run these activities, its nice to have piece of mind, but its probably one of the reasons why the carabiner was invented.
I’m just sharing a useful knot and not trying to get into a Vim vs. Emacs type argument or anything.
Now I'll find myself in a position where I know there's a knot that solves the problem I have, but don't know how to describe it well enough to even search.
They made a cool thing. It is valuable to me. I paid for it, and we're done.
The app downloads once and doesn't need an internet connection. If you drew a Venn diagram of "Times I want to Know How to Tie a Specific Type of Knot" and "Times When I Am Out of Cellphone Range", there would be significant overlap between the two circles.
I'm not a particularly good follower of technical diagrams, but I find the instructions to be very clear and easy to follow. It's rare that I don't get a knot right the first time.
I've secured tarps, tents, clothes lines, gear onto vehicles and (most recently) a mountain bike that was missing its rear suspension, all thanks to this app.
Here's the link to the app available for various devices: https://www.animatedknots.com/shop
EDIT: I forgot about the fishing knots. No matter how good the app is as a resource, I always get confused and frustrated by fishing knots. But I also get confused and frustrated by fishing, so I can't really blame the app for this.
"Do you love advertising?
We need to apologize in advance, because our apps are nothing but knots. We are sure that there are other apps that will suit your needs."
Please tell me where the app has "it's uses" here?
How is it going to screw your system? And just disallow running in background, disallow internet access if you are on mobile. I don't want to fiddle around with my browser when I can install a light-weight app.
Not everyone is a "wow all apps very scary" person
If I were installing a knot app and it required enrolling me in their Knot Tying Social Network, I'd uninstall. In fact, if it couldn't run in Airplane Mode, I'd uninstall it.
People like making apps, and users seem to like them, too. Grow up.
> knot tying is about as harmless as it gets
What does this have to do with my argument? Maybe it's less likely to screw my system intentionally then, but it might still track me. How do you know the app is not as bad as Twitter or LinkedIn?
> People like making apps, and users seem to like them, too. Grow up.
I am just showing a path to an alternate better future. If you don't like questioning the status quo because you think everybody is currently happy, fine. But asking me to grow up because I am worried about corporations having more access to my devices than they need seems unfair.
And while web apps have plenty of practical benefits, those are mostly from the perspective of the developer. As a user, once an app is downloaded, good native apps are preferable just about every time.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUHgGK-tImY
That song both slaps and subverts all expectations. I had always assumed they were a one-hit wonder and simply disappeared. Very creative bunch.
Now I can't get it out of my head.
[] https://www.animatedknots.com/midshipmans-hitch-knot
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/
The practicality of knots and their traits is what drives their use. When you deal with boats, you need these knots to perform and not come undone when you are not expecting them to (which could be dangerous). And you also need them come apart when you need them to.
Properties like that are what makes a lot of these knots so useful. Technically, you can get by with knowing only a handful. But there are a lot of specialized one with niche usages.
I finally got around to doing my day skipper last year and on the course was a Russian who spoke English perfectly fluently but struggled with the technical terms that the rest of us took for granted. It probably doesn't help that sailing is one of those sports where the difference in terminology between British and American English is sometimes significant, for example I don't think the term 'kicking strap' is used in the US.
The knots I use most often even outside of sailing are the bowline and the round turn and two half hitches.
There is a very nice animation on the site for the Monkey's Fist (where I just now learned the finishing touch to deal with the loose end of the line).
https://www.animatedknots.com/monkeys-fist-knot
As a fly angler, in addition to the practicality of a given knots purpose and use is the practicality of implementing it in different conditions. There is often a lot of additional “tribal knowledge” on some of these knots, like the clinch knot is great but tying it with some hemostats speeds the process up and is easier when standing in a river. There is a great trick for tying a blood knot which makes it easy whereas doing it from the website would be nearly impossible outside in the weather.
Naturally, most stories revolve around something impressive (or damning) for humanity like "war" or "kindness", but in the past I've wondered what kind of story one could make if the answer was "knots".
Perhaps that's a question for mathematicians, and whether some facility for topological knot-thinking might be very handy in some kind of physics or engineering.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@First_Class_Amateur
Now I just rely on muscle memory, as trying to "understand" knots always leaves me frustrated...
[1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm