The “Granny Knot”
fieggen.com
fieggen.com
From 1994!
And I like being reminded of the great pressure many creative spirits feel. It's serious business, managing pressure and also doing your work.
For the future, you can usually create these for yourself by going to top of the sites that I linked.
“A centipede was happy – quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?"
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.“
The brain really is fascinating.
It doesn’t help that I’m relatively new to guitar.
I've played for 16 years and I still have these moments. But thankfully it's so satisfying when the music finally kicks in.
My mum frequently punches in her postal code instead.
I realize now I've been having these incidents all my life. Recently I've had the niggling sensation that maybe it's just self-delusion. Nope! Been going on the whole time, just like the lot of you. Thanks for sharing, and I mean that.
Some other trivial life hacks aren't necessarily worth it in practice. With the T-shirt folding one, for instance, the bottom shirt of a stack of shirts tends to unfold itself when you pick up the stack, since one arm of the shirt is basically just folded underneath. The mild inconvenience outweighed the mild convenience for me, and I no longer fold shirts that way.
I'll probably tie my shoes with Ian's knot for life, though.
I use the standard "bunny goes around the tree" methodology, except I go around twice before pulling the loop through both.
It might be easier for your use case, because you can hold the knot with one hand while sending the bunny around the tree with the other.
It's the one I use with my paracord laces.
Never comes undone.
Ian's secure knot doesn't really make sense on such long laces anyway, and making it tight is not very easy because you can't pull to tighten further like you normally would.
The main advantage of Ian's secure knot is that it doesn't come loose over time. But you won't have that problem in ski or skating shoes because you will be redoing much more of the lacing every single time you put them on; a much tighter one at that. So the few hours you'll have your boots on shouldn't make a difference, and if it does, there's something else off in your lacing technique.
ETA: Also, OP may have been tying a Granny Knot from time to time which results in shoelaces coming untied very quickly. So the Ian knot gets you both faster tied shoes and shoes that stay tied.
Changing my Granny Knot (unbalanced) to a Standard Shoelace Knot (balanced) would have produced the same result. However, I found the Ian Knot approach to be helpful in preventing me from absentmindedly reverting back to the Granny Knot.
I’ll try words to describe the Ian Knot: Cross the laces, tuck one under the other, and pull; let go, then pick up a “bunny ear” loop in each hand, one on either side of the pre-knot; with your middle finger, push the out-side of each “ear” through the opposite loop; with thumb and middle finger of each hand, grab the loops simultaneously as they come through; pull tight. Looks like a double knot (two loops, each around the neck of the other) with each free end fed back through, forming the loops and ensuring easy undoing.
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/doublestartknot.htm
And then also a surgeons knot is shown:
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/surgeonknot.htm
(which doesn't use the double starting knot)
I do both together, starting with two twists and then also wrapping the loops twice.
I experimented with the double knot following some foot pain; the advantage for me is that the knot doesn't really slip any, allowing me to set the tension I want and not have to revisit it. I guess you then also have to make sure not to over-tighten.
I read about it here: https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more-sports/running-doc-d...
Especially funny to casually mention it to coworkers or seniors
Also, tie wearers, take the time to learn a Full Windsor:
https://i.imgur.com/CRxFYwS.png
The end result is identical, not really slower, it's easier to adjust the "proportion' during the process, and it works better with long sleeves with minor adjustment.
I mean, if you are into attempts to simulate the look of a four-in-hand knot used on a wider piece of material as popularized by a particular celebrity Nazi sympathizer, sure.
Unless you are particularly tall, in which case finding ties long enough to wear with a full windsor is enough trouble that you might as well find something wide enough to achieve the effect the authentic way with a four-in-hand.
https://www.ties.com/how-to-tie-a-tie/windsor
(Scroll down to Explore More Knots.)
I've been using it since I was 13. My father taught it to me. His father taught it to him. I've taught it to my son.
I haven't tied the the Pratt knot before, but it looks like it's a nice nearly symmetrical knot that doesn't use up much of the tie.
The Windsor is an attempt to simulate, with a common tie, the look of a knot the late Duke of Windsor was known to wear, which was, in fact, a four-in-hand tied on a much wider (and, I suspect—though I have seen no documentation on this point—differently shaped) piece of material than common ties.
> I've been using it since I was 13. My father taught it to me. His father taught it to him. I've taught it to my son.
I’m not sure what relevance that has; I learned it about the same age, also from my father (who I suspect didn’t learn it from his father, whose personality, age, and socioeconomic background probably would not have inclined him to jump on that particular newfangled fashion trend.)
I find the Ian knot effective enough, but I think it comes undone more easily than a normal shoelace knot, I had to tie my shoes a lot back when I was outside for many hours of the day and night.
There is also https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm.
There is a handy listing of which knots are actually different towards the bottom of this page: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/knotcomparison.htm#identica...
So for those kinds of things, I use the ian secure knot: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm
Actually, with the rawhide nonsense on one pair, even that would eventually come loose so I zip-tied the middle of the knot. :)
[0]: https://youtu.be/LXjOLWgWq9kAnd going from "Granny Knot" to "Ian Knot" is actually a lot simpler than relearning the correct way to tie the normal knot. I tried that first ... but relearning the exact same finger movements but mirrored was not possible for me.
I also use his "Secure Knot" [1] when hiking ... although my SO ridicules me for tying shoes with the bunny ears technique :-)
I've been using the Ian knot for probably 10 years now, if anything it's easier to tie it tight since you can keep the tension on the first not held until the very end.
Re people saying the Ian knot doesn’t come undone: neither do my normal ones.
If you're doing it right, the result is not like keeping a finger on the slipknot - it's better (and simpler, faster and as taut as you want).
I’m a runner and it’s important for my laces to be exactly as tight as I need them to be. I’m wondering if others here aren’t as exacting with their knot tension needs.
The technique I use looks like this: https://youtu.be/_aAeI7p-Tkc?t=11
I've used this method to tie all my shoes for more than a decade and it holds much better than the granny knot, which I'd guess is probably 50% of people (as whether not you end up with a granny or a bow knot is just the toss of a coin). The benefit of Ian's tying method is that it is impossible to end up with a granny knot.
My shoes never* come untied, without needing to resort to a "double-knot".
* Except my Sperry Docksiders, which have leather laces and don't seem to keep any kind of knot very well.
Maybe I did the Ian knot wrong. Don't have a problem with the knot I use so not investigating further.
I don't know why anybody makes round laces, especially out of a material that slips.
I have a pair of dress shoes that came with round laces. Even with a "correct" knot, even with double-knotting, they always came undone. I replaced the laces with standard flat laces. They might not look as good, but they look better than having to re-tie them every 30 minutes.
I will say that I cinch the knot tighter with leather laces than any other material because, like you mentioned, they are fussy.
If you want to use the "bunny rabbit" method, the easiest way to turn your granny into a bow is just to switch which way you tie the laces over each other at the beginning – that is much easier than trying to invert the bunny ear thingy.
However, the even easier way (and what GC was pointing out) is the "Ian" method, where you pull the bows through each other simultaneously, which (with practice) is faster and always guarantees a bow knot.
Mr Fieggen's site is a lot older than that, so possibly "parallel thinking"... But because of the cutesy story, cheesy layout, and above all, "Freedom Fries!" name, I'll go with knock-off.
The hardest part about this knot is making sure that somebody is watching while you do it. Every time I tie my shoes alone, I feel an upwelling of regret, as if there has been an opportunity lost.
grab the inside of 2, invert, shove into the inside of 1.
do the same for 3 into 4.
now you have a sheet folded in half, with two pairs of corners together.
grab the inside of 1+2, invert, shove into the inside of 3+4.
now it's folded to a quarter, and all the messy stuff is together.
lay out flat, straighten messy stuff a bit, so you can do the next step more easily.
grab the whole thing, chuck into the closet.Step 2: There is no Step 2
(I do fold sheets for the guest bed but that’s because the alternative set might spend months on the shelf. Most of the time the same set is washed and put straight back on the bed.)
But let's say your washing process is different to mine. I'd still rather do two trips upstairs than fold sheets.
(btw I use Ian's knot)
The "Ian knot" that people are discussing is neither square nor granny knot in and of itself, but how you make it: The technique of having a loose loop in each hand and "pulling both through each other", which is much faster than tbe "ordinary" ways of making each that he presents on each separate knot's page. Topologically it results in the exact same end result: Do it the right way around and you get a square knot; the wrong way, a granny knot.
A bit weird of the tomtenisse to link to that exact page of the site; granny knot / kärringknut is the absolute worst result you could end up with. The whole site is pretty much about how to avoid ending up with one. (OK, slight exaggeration there.)
This one has two twists instead of the normal one, and comes out like a square knot if done right. It won't come untied by itself, ever. But you can untie it by tugging on the tails of the laces. You can do this one with a thumb on the initial bend, unlike the "bunny ears" style knots.
It's a hell of a lot better than the "double knot" your kids' teachers will do if they go to school with any kind of single knot, square or not. Double knotting just results in big jams when one tries to untie it later.
Check out the surgeon's knot: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/surgeonknot.htm
Intellectually, I wonder "how will one get their shoe off, without lots of work". Yet the anger is intense for some inane reason.
Now I wonder if I need therapy, due to some shoe related horror in the past.
What are you talking about? That photo shows the knot at the heel end.
(I had to go back, stare at it, enlarge the pic, stare some more, then I saw it the correct way.)
The perspective of the picture fooled me for a moment too, but this knot is in the usual position.
Hope that makes you feel better.
Is it the security/convenience ratio?
security=1/convenience
EDIT: Wait! I didn't notice this:
"Now, simply pull the loops to tighten the knot. The whole twisted mess of the previous drawing will rearrange itself into exactly the same finished knot as my Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot."
https://www.bestshoe99.in/how-to-tie-shoelaces/
It is symmetrical, it looks beautiful, it takes about as much time to tie and it has exactly zero chance of untying itself.
It has never failed me since I learned it.
The Berluti knot traces back into European aristocracy.
Ian's secure knot neglects to tuck one of the loose ends - it's not as secure.
The Turquise Turtle Knot is described on page 357 and it is similar, but not the same as Berluti knot.
Is this just a failing of this knot or am I doing something wrong?
I don't remember how to tie the knot. Instead when I am in the middle of tying it I imagine which way the ears will come out and if it will not go the correct way I take the other direction (there is only two possible ways to tie it).
I believe that power is passed along selectively to children, to help decide who the future elite are.... the "lucky" half are taught how to correctly tie their shoes... the other half end up with granny knots, which then signals to the elite this person is not one of them.
I was one of the granny knot population, always having to stop and re-tie my shoes... fortunately I learned the error of my ways about 3 years ago.
I think it's the same process as button shirts. This is a whole culture and social marker, but ultimately you can live your life without wearing them more than once a year.
Seriously, who has time to tie their shoelaces everytime they put on their shoes?
Clothing is just as much about comfort as it is about impressions.
Similarly: half of the top 10 most-voted questions on StackOverflow are about Git.
A roadie coil produces consistent loops, which are large-radius bends, aka gentle bends. This is what you want for electrical cable, especially high-quality expensive cables you want to last a long time. Tight-radius bends, aka kinks, can cause premature failure.
Folding is fine if the cord is extremely flexible, or for rope.
Folding done right produces no twists at all about the axis of the line, which is ideal. That’s why it is the preferred method for packaging rock climbing ropes. The roadie coil produces alternating twists that mostly cancel each other out once it is fully uncoiled.
https://www.animatedknots.com/square-knot
https://www.animatedknots.com/shoelace-bow-knot
The latter page links back to the submitted link!
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknotanalyser.htm
What a wonderful website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FMBSblpcrc
That and using the back of my hand/arm to push off the water from my body after a shower keep our towels much dryer and nicer.
There's no downside to getting towels less wet (in particular when you're just flicking off water/pushing it off with your hand/arm for free), but there are upsides. So why not?
That said, I’ve tried a bunch of different ways to tie my shoes and never found a big difference between them.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I learned how to tie my shoes correctly 2 years ago. I've been doing wrong my whole life.
This may the only context in which my running can be compared with Bolt's!
There are three ways to tie a square knot wrong. One of them is the 'Granny'. I don't remember the names of the others.
Anyway its the reason our climbing staff teach to never tie any climbing rope with a square knot - because you have three ways to kill yourself. Tied wrong it can just 'walk off the rope'.
I do this with shoe laces, more recently with my new bike lock. Was kind of weird and slow and clumsy for me to open and close, so I spent 5 minutes figuring out the feel of the key and the rotating mechanism and now I can do it quickly and easily with one hand (45s->10s).
It amazes me how people don’t slow down to figure out the little things. One of my ex-girlfriends would always struggle to unlock the door to our old apartment. It was a janky lock. Coming home late, drunk, in the cold, in the rain, and she’d sit there for 2-3 minutes getting frustrated trying to get it open. The first time I unlocked it I was like “oh, this lock sucks, let’s see how it opens”. You insert the key, but it goes too far - the cylinder won’t rotate unless the key is backed out about 1mm from where it bottoms out. So, just insert the key, and press on the lock with your pointer finger as you apply gentle torque and it’ll open easily. Takes less than 5s, every time. I tried to show her this and explain the process, but she didn’t have the patience - “I know how to open a lock!” So I let it rest.
Baffles me though, some people would rather spend 30m/week fiddling with something that 5 minutes of deliberate attention would solve once and for all.
When did we learn this behaviour? Does it indicate higher thought/intelligence? We teach our children to tie knots at a very young age, so knots must be important right? Which other animal can tie knots? Is knot making just another form of weaving?
And lets say we do build an AI that resembles human nature/consciousness closely, can it tie knots? Maybe an AI is only valid if it can introspect, love, hate, philosophize, do math and.. tie knots! What about knitting/crocheting?
Maybe weaving (knot-making/knitting etc) is/was just as important as discovering/understanding fire. Imagine our primate ancestors, just chilling in a jungle somewhere and weaved some pieces of plant fibers together and some lightbulb went on in their heads.. and they continued making them and adjusting them and found useful uses for them (or maybe they just enjoyed the pattern or the effect of pulling one string and the whole knot comes undone - Wow!).
Knots sure are interesting!
Instead of doing Left-Over-Right, Do Right-Over-Left (or vice versa if you do your swoop differently than me).
I personally do not like the "Ian Knot". It requires you to take both hands off from the first cross, which results in looser laces.
__________
For those that want security without struggling to remove a double knot, this is the method I learned in the military:
Tie a simple not at the end of each lace just above the straight plastic piece. These simple knots never get untied.
Tie your boots with whatever method you normally use.
Pull the loops as big as they will become, the small knots at the end of the laces will stop at the center knot.
(Optional) Tuck your longer than normal loops into your boot so you don't look like an idiot. This gives a clean look in all footware, not just boots.
The laces will likely never come undone, and you won't have to struggle to remove a double knot.
(Ever since the pandemic began I've only worn sandals or a certain pair of sneakers with very round laces. Maybe round laces stick worse?)
EDIT: Looks like I should try the surgeon's knot.
With that said, sometimes it’s the fault of the shoelaces themselves. Loops that are too large (overly long shoelaces) can snag on items in the environment (twigs, branches, etc.) to become forcibly untied, and some very specific kinds of shoelaces can be too slick and/or too stiff to keep a knot firmly tied (Canadian DoD shoelaces for boots are both very stiff and quite slick when brand new, they need to be broken in to hold fast; some dress shoes have similar laces, albeit stupidly thin).
Because I always start right over left (or vice versa, I can't remember), my shoe laces never have that weird vertical orientation. My son, however, always has this problem.
I think it's a generational thing! Parents show their kids how to tie knots, and they always do it from the front, so each generation sees a mirrored version of the way their parents tie knots. So it goes, backs me forth throughput the years...
Just a theory, but I'm sticking to it.
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/twoloopknot.htm
Professor Shoelace kind of looks like a topology professor of mine.
Tying your shoelaces is "lost technology." When I was in first grade nearly everyone could tie their shoes properly.
Today, I can go weeks and not see anyone in public with their laces in the proper bow knot. (This includes professional athletes.)
When did we collectively lose the ability to dress ourselves? And why?
/Acey
(We've taught them how to tie laces on multiple occasions but it's pointless if they don't have shoes where they need to tie them)
Doesn't work as well for boots though, and tying a fisherman's knot while wearing snow gloves is a pain.
I had never learned how to tie my shoes and some day decided to look it up online. I taught myself the Ian Knot from the pictures on the site and have been using it since. That was over ten years ago and it's still the only way I know to tie my shoes. Thank you, Ian.
I cannot imagine having to tie shoes several times a week let alone several times a day. Seems like a waste of time.
Now I just don't care. Sure it takes 15 seconds to tie them but at some point I just stopped caring about those 15 seconds.
I know now we were totally wrong about that!
This kind of website is why I love the internet. I mean, look at the level of devotion on display here!
Later, as a boy scout I learned how to tie the alternative square knot, which looks cool and symmetrical and offers the tremendous advantage of being easily untied.
One of the great small lessons in life.
While I was aware of the term "Reef knot", that knot is commonly, almost exclusively, called a "Square knot" in my (midwestern American) dialect of English.
Is this a British thing?
Reef, bowline, and figure-eight are the three knots you must be able to tie behind your back to pass a basic sailing class.
I will reiterate though, that the reef knot is called a square knot where I come from. Misnomer? I guess, that's what everyone calls it, an overhand stop knot is an overhand or just a "knot" actually.
Turn's out I'm unable to create a Granny Know without putting a lot of effort into it. Only if I change the first stage I'm able to do it.
Great site. Thank you.
Do the "bunny ears" way of tying your shoes but loop both "ears" through. Presto, a knot that won't work its way undone and you can usually tell when you step on a lace because there's so much resistance.
Also how I tie my youngest's cleats for soccer and t-ball: he hasn't had his shoelaces come undone since I switched to this technique.
FYI: ABOK #80, #186, #464, #1206 are called Granny knots but not the Granny of shoe knots.
#1212 is the conventional shoe knot, #1215 - #1219 are alternate versions. I don't see a Granny shoe knot except maybe #1220 as a parcel knot, perhaps because it's "wrong" for the cosmetics of shoes. Granny knots were/are a derisive term for dangerous or improper knots. IIRC right rectangular prism parcels were wrapped in brown paper like a Christmas present but then wrapped once in twine, twisted 90 degrees underneath, wrapped again perpendicularly, and then finished with a Granny shoe/parcel knot at a 45 degree? angle. I guess one could also use other knots, but they maybe more difficult to untie.
https://archive.org/details/TheAshleyBookOfKnots has a bazillion knots categorized and with their uses.
But obviously you're talking about the "Ian knot". My wife taught me this knot about 20 years ago. She grew up in China and had been tying her shoelaces this way since primary school.
Ian claims to have invented the knot in 1982. Now it's conceivable that the "Ian knot" took the world by storm and spreaded to China quickly, but seeing it's the pre-Internet era, I highly doubt it. I myself had never heard of it until I saw her do it.
So it's likely Ian independently discovered the knot, more so than him being the first person to ever come up with it.
Did you come up with this knot yourself 45 years ago, or did you learn it from someone else?
BTW I upvoted you.
It also reenforces the idea that certain knots are “better” or “appropriate”, upholding and propagating white supremacy.
We should rename this cultural atrocity and outdated term as “the people’s knot”.
Please stop posting ideological flamebait comments to HN generally. We've asked you repeatedly, and when accounts ignore such requests, we eventually ban them. I don't want to ban you because your good comments are good, but protecting the site from hellfire has to take precedence, so please stop that.