Tie Binding Knots

Chris Conrad: Hello, my name is Chris Conrad. I am an Assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 165 in Fredericksburg, Virginia and today we are learning everyday knots. Right now I am going to show you two binding knots, first the square knot and then the thief s knot. Now, the square knot is actually the first knot that scouts, coming in the boy s scouts have to learn. It is fairly simple knot and I am using two different colored pieces of cord, one red, one yellow, to demonstrate this knot.

Basically, you will need two or three inches of working end, on either piece of cord and we are going to take the right hand over the left hand and twist it under. Notice the chords have changed hands and now we are going to take the one in my left hand and put it over the one in my right hand. So, it is right over left then left over right and you notice that this forms a very beautiful knot. You can test to make sure that its square knot as opposed to a granny knot, if it slides like this.

Now, a practical application for this knot that we use in boy s scout all the time, is tying bandages. Now, what I have here, is actually a cub s scout neckerchief and my piece of bamboo here is going to represent a wounded arm of one of our cub scouts and what I am going to do with the ends of neckerchief, I am going to go right over left and left over right. This forms a square knot that the Romans believed would aid in the healing of wounds that does not need to super tight, it just needs to be tight enough in order to keep the bandage in place.

The next knot I am going to show you is the thief s knot; it is also a binding knot. The history of the thief s knot came from sailing ships. When sailors would use a piece of cord to bind the top of the heavy canvas set that contained all their possessions and what they would do is they would normally tie a square knot to cinch that shut and we have seen a square knot that looks like this. Notice that, both tails for the square knot are coming on the top side of this knot.

A thief s knot on the other hand looks a little bit different. I am going to start with a loop; I am going to come up through the loop, I am going to cross behind on the same side as my yellow tag end and then come back down and through the knot. Now, it looks an awful knot like a square knot, behaves similarly to a square knot, but notice tail ends are on opposite sides and so a sailor would tie a thief s knot around the top of his sack and if another sailor came and stole something and tie the bag up with the square knot, he would know that his privacy had been invaded.

So, we just learned the square knot and the thief s knot. The next two knots, we are going to learn are also binding knots. They are pole hitch and turquoise turtle