The turks head knot, a decorative, yet challenging little knot. It was commonly used on sweet bags and is still used today as a decorative knot and seems to be popular for Boy Scouts as a Wood Badge Woggle. Initially I used the instructions from Jacqui Carey’s Sweet Bags book but was confused that it didn’t match some of the knots shown in the close-up images of period bags. There seemed to be various sizes of the knot.
After perusing various books, I found a wealth of information on the internet. It seems there is an entire class of knots known as Turk’s head. They are characterized by leads and bights. What are those you ask? Leads are the number of loops the knot is created from and bights are the indentations created by the weave pattern.
So the knot instructions from the Carey book on Sweet bags is a 3 lead 4 bight knot, which was perfect for the small knots. However, I wanted a wider knot for the top of my bottom dangles and that matched the knot seem in some of the sweet bags shown in the book. I found instructions for a 4 lead 5 bight knot. This was perfect. This is a 4 loop knot with 5 indentations.
I found great instructions for this knot from The International Guild of Knot Tyers. They call it the 5 x 4 Turk’s Head on Hand. I started the knot on hand as it set up the weave. Then tightened this down over a chopstick. The knot is then transferred to the sweet bag and tightened further. You can’t tighten too much as you need room to weave 2 more passes of thread to bulk out the knot.
I used #4 Gilt Smooth Passing Thread from Access Commodities. It is challenging to tighten this knot down evenly before you start weaving, but the result was a nicely woven knot that covered the area I wanted. Instructions for the smaller 3 lead 4 bight knot are found in the Sweet Bags book. Carey gives great instructions. The initial weave also makes a decorative flat knot also found on sweet bags usually made from gimp.
