More Than Knots

Bowline Knot Pictures

The Bowline knotboard was started after reading several letters and articles written in the IGKT publication Knotting Matters.  Each article referenced several Bowline knots.  I had also heard a scout leader ask a scout to tie “The” bowline, as if there was only one Bowline knot.  This prompted me to do some research into how many Bowline knot variations there were. 

Surprisingly, The Ashley Book of Knots doesn’t have very many variations of the Bowline.  Fortunately I was able to find Graumont and Hensel’s book, Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Rope Work, published in 1942.  They list 46 Bowline variations.  Additional research in Knotting Matters found more variations, research into published books found even more, and searching on the Internet located some more.  From the research I was able to make a knotboard with 55 variations of the Bowline.  (I only show 33 pictures at this time.)

In doing the research, I was able to find over 120 different names for Bowline knots although there aren’t necessarily 120 different knots.  Quite a few knots have different names.  So part of the research was to identify different names for the same knot.  This, in turn, led to a search for Bowline variation names.  On my other web page, I list most of the names I’ve found over the years of research.   

The purpose of this web page is to show close-up pictures from the Bowline Knot board.