The Cloverleaf Knot
酢漿草結, 酢浆草结, 几帳結び, 생쪽매듭
Generalities
Many other knot families branch from the humble Cloverleaf, including the Stellar, the Good Luck, the Mystic/Pan Chang, and the the Treasure/Bao. The Cloverleaf itself can be thought of as a two stitch slice through a crown sennit or a stack of two crown knots tied with one cord.
Nomenclature
I previously chose to give it the name of flower knot because I've always thought of its basic shape and ordinal variations as flowers. I have since realized that this is incorrect and will be using cloverleaf going forward.
Part of the problem that I was trying to avoid was the cloverleaf/round brocade issue. In Chinese, this knot is called cloverleaf if the number of ears is 5 or less and round brocade if 6 or more. The arbitrary change in name based on the number of ears is mildly confusing, but I have faith in your ability to keep up, even when I'm being inconsistent.
Chen 1: Cloverleaf Knot (, ) [] (3, 4), Round Brocade Knot (, ) [] (6)Ruri-Ishikawa: () [] (4), () [] (6)
ABoK: #2449 (1), #652, #2448 (3), #2451, #2477, #2479, #2482 (4), #2453 (5o1), #2455, #2484 (6o1),
Korean: Ginger Maedeup () [] (4), Plum Blossom Knot () [] (6)
Owen: Butterfly Knot (3)
Hensel: Dragonfly Knot (4)
TAoCaWK: Double Loop Shamrock Knot (3), Shamrock Knot (4), Petal Knot (5-10), Ruyi Knot () [] (3(1)x4)
Translation Notes
Cloverleaf 3-5
Strict translation of the Chinese (, , ) for the triangular cloverleaf (3 eared cloverleaf) or square cloverleaf (4 eared cloverleaf) gives oxalis corniculata or wood sorrel, a clover-like plant.
The Japanese (() ()() ()()()) machine translates as "screen".
The Korean (, ) officially translates as "ginger knot", which in French is "".
Cloverleaf 6 or more (aka Round Brocade)
The hexagonal cloverleaf knot is more commonly known as the round brocade knot (, , ) which machine retranslates (2012) as "mission jin". Individually, the characters 團 translate as "ball" and 錦 "brocade" (noun) or "glorious" (adj). A final note to the Chinese translation fun, is that the simplified version (versus the traditional above) of these same characters are very different () unlike the simplifed for the square cloverleaf.
The Japanese (() ()() ()()()) machine translates to English as "brocade".
The Korean (, ) is known as the "plum blossom knot". To round out the list of languages for which I have official or semi-official translations or canonical names, the French name for this knot (as translated from Korean) is "".
How To
General Tips
- keep the loops that form the centre of the knot similarly oriented. That is to say, as a general rule keep the part of the loop that leads from the already completed body of the knot aligned to the top of the knot and the part of the loop that is closer to the free working end aligned to the bottom of the knot. You can reverse this orientation if you wish, as long as you are consistent with all the loops.
- keep the centre loops as short as will still allow you to work, the ears will take care of themselves. Keeping the centre short and tidy will be closer to the final structure of the knot and easier to control than if the centre loops are allowed to get long.
- you'll find that if you pull hard enough, that you can take up slack from one ear to another. This is not recommended because the larger the knot, the more this type of activity will deform the central structure of the knot. Also, you may find that you are tightening the knot too much, so that when it is time to adjust and fine tune the final structure of the knot (or take it apart because you made a mistake in design) that it is exceedingly difficult to do so.
The square cloverleaf is the most common of the cloverleaf knots, especially since it is easy to combine many of them into a single design.
The procedure to make 3 cloverleaf is exactly the same as the 4 cloverleaf except that you do step 1, skip step 2 and go directly to step 3.
The procedure to make the pentagonal cloverleaf can be exactly the same as the square cloverleaf except that you add an extra loop between step 2 and step 3. As you can see from this image
however,
the centre is already getting quite large and loose, and
if the centre doesn't hold the whole knot will fall apart.
A modification that will be introduced for the hexagonal
cloverleaf can also be used for the pentagonal cloverleaf.
As always, the option is yours.
This variant of the pentagonal cloverleaf is made with the same centre doubling strategy as is used in making the hexagonal cloverleaf except, of course, leaving out step 3 so that you only have 5 petals.
As the cloverleaf knots get larger, the centers become larger and looser, holding together more poorly. With the hexagonal cloverleaf knot, we introduce overlapping as a construction variation that can be used to remedy this problem.
This heptagonal cloverleaf is made with the same centre doubling strategy as is used in the making of the hexagonal cloverleaf.
As the hexagonal cloverleaf is constructed with a "doubled" centre, so the octagonal cloverleaf is constructed with a "tripled" centre.
This nonagonal cloverleaf is made with the same centre tripling strategy as is used in the making of the octagonal cloverleaf.