Tie Knots - Loops

Chris Conrad: Hi my name is Chris Conrad. I am an assistant Scoutmaster in Troop 165 in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Today, we are learning everyday useful knots. The two knots I am going to show you now are the alpine butterfly and the figure-eight loop. Firstly, alpine butterfly; the alpine butterfly starts with the short end on the front of the left palm, the long end leading behind. We are going to wrap the long end around the palm, once, twice, so that we have three strands across the front and three strands across the back.

Now, the first move of this knot is to take the loop closes to the fingers and to jump it into the center, so that it become the new center loop on the palm, we then take the one closest to the fingers, pull out a little bit of slack. It crosses over both loops and under both loops and then we take the entire knot, holding it by that last loop and we pulled it off the hand. We then pull down on both ends to snug the knot and to check, I like to do this with the kids; to check that it is truly an alpine butterfly, we pull both ends away from each other and that forms two loops on the top, which are the butterfly s wings.

Now, the beauty of this knot is; first, we did not need an end to tie it, it could be tied anywhere along the links of a long piece of rope or cord, second, no matter how I pull on this knot and the loop around the ends, it is a very steady anchor. Now, the next knot I would like to show you is called the figure-eight loop. This knot is tied with a large band, which we are going to form into a figure eight. So, I am going to cross it over, keeping the lane nice and even, cross it back under the working part and then that working loop will dive down through that loop I have just created. And if I keep this knot nice and flat, when I will pull it tight, I have just created a very secure loop.

Now, the last variation on this figure-eight loop is called the threaded figure-eight and for that we are going to need to go over to our hitching pole. Well, we have just tied the figure-eight loop, but what if you wanted to use that loop as an anchor and you needed to tie it around the tree, for example. What we are going to tie now is a threaded figure-eight loop. We are going to start by tying a simple figure-eight in our line. Ok, figure-eight. And from there, we are going to wrap around a tree, in this case a piece of bamboo. And what we need to do is we need to re-thread this figure-eight working from the back to forward. So, where it exceeded than that, we will enter back end of the knot and we are simply going to run this line parallel to the original lap, threading our way back along it.

So, turn this corner, dive down underneath this turning and you should try to make sure that this knot lays as flat as possible. Then we will come back around and out the final hole. So, we have retraced the figure-eight. In terms of overall form this is just like the figure-eight loop. we pull that tight and we have a substantial anchor.

We have been learning how to tie everyday knot, the next knot we are going to learn is the bowline.