New Year & Rope making

Over the last month or so I've spent a fair bit of time standing in outbuildings looking at cows, so I've had a bit of an enforced break from most of the projects I'd intended to work on.

But given time to stand about surrounded by little more than bales and straw, I experimented with rope-making. The first piece is a ~five foot length of 4 stranded rope(pictured right) that I made out of the twine salvaged from hay bales as I cut them open. Each bale provides two lengths of twine which I twisted together into a single cord. I then laid 4 of those cords together to make a rope with a diameter of about 1/2 inch. The ends are finished with a wall & crown knot.

I've now started twisting strands of straw into twine with the intention of making a similar piece of natural fibre rope.

I'm given to understand that my Great grandfather made harness' for cart and plough horses using rope made from marram grass. This is something that I will need to research, finding out whether the grass will need to be dried or should be used green etc etc. My initial thoughts are that the result will be significantly better than straw, since maram does not have the 'knuckles' that straw does and should cord more smoothly. Ultimately I'd like to make a few lengths of marram rope and make some woven knot mats (I suspect reference material for harness will be very hard to find).


As I get a bit more time to sit down and organise some of the things I've worked on into coherent posts/articles. There should be a more along presently.

S.