Dear friends and encouragers,
Thank you! After browsing the many intriguing and informative links, I feel much more hopeful of being able to teach Tim some knots.
I should have mentioned in my first post that we are located on the top side of Manchester, England. If we are ever able to get to any international meetings, it will be a pleasure to do so. And thank you too, for the encouragement over junior firefighter training; I've not heard of any such thing in the UK, but I can make some enquiries.
Can I ask for some more clarification, though, as to the more general uses of knots. All the sites I looked at classify by name, or by category, and I am finding it hard to envisage specific, but non-fishing/climbing/sailing purposes for even the basic 8 knots on the scout sites - although Mr Folsom's site has given me a better idea of purposes. This may simply be because I only use a couple of basic knots myself: tying bags of leftover food to be dropped in the freezer is not exactly rock-climbing stuff.
To lift an example or two from my original post, what sort of knot or combination of knots should I suggest for hauling 18-inch long Tonka vehicles to the top of a six-foot climbing frame?
And as my son likes to perform 'cliffside rescues' by climbing up slippery ropes on the slide mounted on the side of the climbing frame, what would be the best knots to use for that? I got a length of washing line rope some weeks ago, which is literally only about 4mm wide, but at 30m for £1.49 I don't mind how much messed up. Could this be doubled up, or braided/plaited in some way to make it more useful? I'm sort of thinking along the lines of putting nice big stopper knots or figure 8 knots in it every so often, to give some purchase.
Anyway, by way of further thanks: my Dad has begun to reawaken his knotting knowledge, has made us a small knotting display board and has been lent a copy of Ashley's by a friend of his. And more than this, when I showed him the Animated Knots site, I clicked on the Bowline as a random example. "Oh," he said, "the rabbit and tree knot." I've often remembered that there was a knot he once taught me, some 30 years ago, that involved the telling of a story about a rabbit and a tree, but I never knew the name or purpose of the knot. Now I do!
Incidentally - my Dad has also constructed a simple wooden board with pins and layout for making flat Turks Heads. Can I now find him any flat Turks Head instructions? No, I have managed to mislay them all. Could anyone direct me to some nice, simple, well illustrated examples please?
Regards and smiles,
Mrs G Chew
1 Corinthians 15:10