With the video Jeffrey “cwtrain” Eldredge uploaded to YouTube yesterday, the story of the inverse tie-knots finally seems to have come to an end. In the video Jeffrey demonstrates exactly ↵the sequence I had come up with on 19 October 2008. This knotting-sequence I had christened ‘Eldredge Variant,’ because all I did was adding two through-the-loop moves to Jeffrey’s original sequence, thereby making it into a knot. Since then I regularly wear the knot in public and even made inverse tie-knots the core topic of my Habilitationsvortrag ‘↑There is no Merovingian! Tie-knots, Neo-Dandyism and Cyberculture,’ presented on 03 February … Continue reading →

To my eyes ↵the ‘Eldredge’ is an absolute beauty, but the solution Jeffrey Eldredge chose for the final move does not exactly leave us with a ‘knot’ in the technical sense of the term. He simply tucks what is left of the narrow end of the tie away under the collar and the loop the tie forms around the neck. That way we depend on the pressure the loop around the neck exerts on the collar for the whole structure not to come apart. To improve this situation I added two ‘through-the-loop’ movements to Jeffrey’s invention. Translated to Fink-Mao notation, … Continue reading →

After having published ↵merovingian ties—beyond the 85 knots of Fink and Mao, I started to contact some of the involved protagonists. ↑Lord Whimsy was the first to answer and confirmed a suspicion of mine. To my question on how he discovered the knot, Whimsy answered: ‘If memory serves, I found a few sources online (I believe it was a pdf file somewhere). After some failed attempts of my own, I finally figured it out.’ So, it seems that Whimsy got hold of the same tutorial by edeity, ↑published at zgeek, with which Henry Hu started out. Like Henry, Whimsy, too, … Continue reading →