Braiding a Piece of Hemp Jewelry – The Josephine Knot or the Pretzel Knot

The Josephine Knot (or the Pretzel Knot, as it’s oftentimes known) is more complicated than your basic square knot, but it can give a pretty sweet effect to a piece of jewelry. You can also make a piece of jewelry using solely this knot (I don’t personally like the way this looks, but it’s all up to you). Take a look at my other posts, and mix and match techniques and other ideas. Here is what this knot will look like:

First of all, these instructions will only cover tying the Josephine knot. It’s up to you to figure out how to use it in your jewelry. However, it looks just as good using four cords, seperating the two leftmost and the two rightmost cords and treating each pair as a single cord. You will only need two pieces of hemp cord for this knot instead of the usual four. Bear with me, as they are terrible pictures I made in Paint, but it gets the job done. Not an incredibly hard knot to figure out. Just follow these pictures in order:

 

 

In the last picture, I changed a portion of the red line to blue to indicate which end of the cord goes under which. Holding the top of the cords, tighten the bottoms simultaneously. The knot should look like a pretzel. That’s it. Go ahead and try it out. Let me know if the pictures aren’t enough to figure it out. I can take some actual pictures, or a video. Good luck.