Make It · Book Four

The Gate Knot

Here is the other thing this book is about. The Tally builds a band you have to file off. The Roost builds a gate that comes undone if you lean on it — and a boy ties one in Chapter Two in three minutes without saying a word. This is that knot. It holds while you want it to and falls apart in your hand when you do not, and once you can tie it you will use it for the rest of your life.

Ink drawing of the finished build.
The finished thing, drawn the way the books draw an object.

You need

  • about three feet of soft cord
  • a shoelace or a bootlace — not string thin enough to cut
  • not wire
  • not anything stretchy; one chair; a strip of newspaper or a paper streamer

About half an hour. Everything on that list came out of a kitchen, which is the rule these pages are written to.

Steps

  1. Take the cord behind the chair leg so you have a long end and a short end.
  2. Make a fold in the long end — a bight, which is a loop with no end poking through it. Push the bight behind the leg and out the other side.
  3. Now make a bight in the short end and push it through the first bight. Pull the long end to snug it down. Keep your fingers outside every loop while you pull.
  4. Test it. Hold the long end and pull, gently. It holds.
  5. Now pull the short end. The whole thing falls apart in your hand at once, and the cord comes off the chair in one piece. That is the entire trick and there is nothing else to it.
  6. Tie one to each of two chair legs and run a paper streamer between them across a doorway. Walk into the streamer. The gate lets you out. That is why Nine can be kept somewhere without being shut in, and it is why she walked out in Chapter Eight without noticing she had.