Braiding a Piece of Hemp Jewelry – The Monk’s Braid Knot

The monk’s braid is a knot that I just recently stumbled upon and tried out. From what I gathered, its origins come from the belts of Oriental monks. It’s a pretty cool macrame knot that produces a very stretchy, round, almost rope-like necklace. It looks something like this (don’t mind the beads, I was just playing with different ways to put them on the neckace):

This knot looks pretty complicated, but once you’ve successfully tied it just a few times, it’s relatively easy to do. You’re going to need to cut your cords and tie your starting loop. This one will be done a little differently than you are used to: you will be working from the top of the knot rather than the side. Sit with the knot between your knees. I was going to take pictures for this one, but in all honesty it is much easier to understand when demonstrated in Paint. Set your cords up like this:

Now, take the top cord, loop it around and over the cord on the right, like this:

Then, take the cord on the right, and go over both the top and bottom cords:

Keep working clockwise like this, always going over all other cords:

Now, when you get to the last cord, you are going to go over the top cord, then under it, like this:

Once your cords look like the picture above, tighten them all by pulling on opposite cords until the cords form sort of a square. Once tight, repeat all the steps again. While this is a fairly simple and cool looking knot, I quickly learned that it takes forever to make a piece of jewelry using it. Worth it, in my opinion, but that’s just me. Probably the simplest way to add a bead would be to just put all four cords through the bead, then continuing knotting. However, I used really thick hemp on this one, and I learned that it looked kind of cool when you put one small bead on each of the four strings, then continuing to knot. Another good thing about this knot is that it doesn’t matter where you start off, because it will turn out exactly the same despite which order you overlap the cords.

This is a pretty unique knot, and I have not seen much (if any) jewelry made using it. Give it a try, and see what you think. Let me know how it turns out. Good luck.