I selected the Brain Bag as my new carry-on bag. And thanks to this post in the Tom Bihn forums, I decided before the bag even arrived that I’d put 550 paracord zipper pulls on the bag.
Oh, yeah. I worked the Frozen Four in Pittsburgh last week. It was fun!
In the few bits of down time I had during the Frozen Four, I started playing around with knots. I started on the front of the bag with the three small pockets. And since the blog has been quiet for so long, I figured I’d blog about the knots I used (and document the resources I used to find the knots I selected!
On the sides, for the bright green pulls, I chose a Snake Knot, six layers long.
For the top-center, which is perfect for my keys and sunglasses, I found the Pupa Pull Tie. In a day-glo orange.
The most difficult knot to select was the Oysterman’s Stopper Knot, used on the center-back pocket in yellow. I tried many, many different knots to find one that I liked, and this is where I finally landed. (the pictures in the arena showed the yellow paracord with simple overhand knots, which I used until I had time today to figure out something I really liked.)
And finally, my favorite of all the knots that I used, the rainbow paracord on the large center pocket is a Two-Strand Diamond Knot.
If I hadn’t really wanted variety in the knots as well as the colors of paracord, I would have used the Diamond Knot on all of the zipper pulls. Once I found the video I linked above, the knot was totally simple and it looks fabulous!
Now that I have my zipper pulls figured out, I just need to make friends with my bag. I’ve carried it for four days now, just not for its intended purpose. Hopefully, by the time I get back from next week’s adventure (to UCLA for the women’s gymnastics championship!) I’ll have made friends with both this bag and my new work bag.
Oh, and here’s hoping there will be a fiber-related post at some point this week. I need a couple more pictures and some time to write the post.
