About the book:
A vintage Gilcraft rope knotting pocket book, published for the Scouting Association. Illustrated with numerous simple and clear line drawings and instructions for knots, splices, lashings, plaits etc and details of the usage of each.
About the binding:
- A full leather binding covered in sage green goatskin sewn on three tapes.
- The cover is decorated with twenty eight hand-embroidered knots taken from illustrations inside the book, each sewn in a variety of different coloured threads that merge into one another creating an interlocking pattern.
- On the inside of the boards, on the paper doublures, are the names of each of the knots plus a reference number leading you to the pages within the book to find them on.
- As well as the embroidery on the cover there are small additions of gold wire and wood veneer on four of the knots.
- The book is blind tooled in the spaces between the knots using a hand-made finishing tool.
- The book is then housed in a tulip wood box with the title of the book on the lid.
Binder’s Statement:
The design was based on the knots, splices, lashings and plaits illustrated within the text block. I designed the binding so that each of the diagrams joined together on the cover, with lines of rope connected through the series of knots. The box was designed with a pouch in the lid containing a card of strings to “tie your own” knot from the book.
More details about this binding can be read in a blog post here.
Han, I had no idea you had done a Knotting binding! How did that happen. Absolutely love it. The new website if fantastic too. Well done. Amazing to realise that you have been doing this since 2006…. no wonder you are so good at it, although as I remember you were pretty good at it to begin with!
The Scouts ‘Gilcraft’ book of knotting – what a lovely little book this was to work on. I’d love to do another in the future, if you can suggest and fabulous knotting books that might be good candidates let me know!