I’ve spent the last 2 and a half hours doing something which turned out to be a bit more physically challenging than I thought it would be. I spent the last two hours weaving old climbing rope into something that resembles rope a bit less.

I started with this, donated by Eamon (thanks Eamon)

and worked my way through this stage:

and this stage

and got to

here

There’s still some tightening work to be done on it but it’s no longer a mess all over the living room floor. And it’s no longer a pile of old rope.

I followed the guidelines here to create the knot – it’s called an ocean plait – and it’s currently about 2 feet by 15 inches.

The thing which struck me most was how tiring it was to do for the first hour or so – this is when you are laying out the rope. Lots of moving about and bending and walking with ends of rope and hopping up and down. When it’s about twice the size as it is in the picture, ie, tightened up a good bit, you don’t do so much moving around, just a lot of rope pulling. If you’re lucky you find mistakes comparatively quickly (they aren’t that easy to miss anyway).

I want to do another one, strangely enough. I know this one is not quite finished but it won’t take so long tomorrow or Thursday.

It’s very therapeutic, just pulling the rope every which way. And I didn’t even get rope burn. In an ideal world, if my flu jab doesn’t lay me out, I’ll go climbing tomorrow – not much opportunity between here and Christmas otherwise – and I’ll show it to the people who were wondering what on earth I  was taking a pile of old rope around with me.