One of the ways we measure time passing is by counting a repeated action: a mark made on the wall (to mark time), the sun rising and setting, our bodies sleeping and waking. Many calendars are made in that style, a page you have to tear off every day, squares you can X through, etc. I used to find these kind of calendars annoying. Why do I have to do the work? Why can’t the calendar just track the day for me so I won’t get confused if a miss a day? But in the age of ubiquitous digital timekeeping, I’ve come to appreciate physical actions as time trackers even more, especially things with more unusual or complex actions like advent calendars, menorahs, even annual festivals themselves.
So in that spirit (thought definitely on the simpler end of things), this week’s time piece is a knot calendar. It could work in two ways: tying a knot each day to accumulate time or untying a pre-tied knot. I think I like the latter best — sitting down at the beginning of a year/month/whatever larger unit of time you want to mark and tying a series of knots to mark the smaller parts. There could be special knots for special holidays, birthdays, weekends, anniversaries, etc., different colored strings/ropes/ribbons, lots of possibilities. For this little prototype I’ve used satin knotting cord for weekdays and narrow day-glo cord for weekends, and I’ve knotted two weeks’ worth (I think fortnights are a really underrated and extremely useful unit of time).
You could assemble an annual calendar but making 26 of them, and hanging them side-by-side on the wall or tying them each to a dowel. Each day you would unknot one of the knots and after every fortnight a set of strings would be hanging loose. It would be really fun to play with different kinds/colors/thicknesses of cord, different knots, and different patterns. I chose these knots mainly becaue they’re fairly easy both to tie and to untie and they worked with the cord I had laying around the house.
As you can probably see from this prototype I’m not a very adept knotter (especially when getting help from my cat Mojo Jojo — she seemed to find the smell of the day-glo cord really enticing), but once you get the hang of a particular knot of two it’s a very soothing, rhythmic thing to do. These are just sketches for the idea, I think it could be really lovely with better (maybe different) knots, maybe different cord, and definitely with more even and evenly spaced knots. Maybe I’ll try some further, more complicated variations in later weeks.
I’m not sure knots and untying could translate well to a digital format, but maybe later I’ll come up with something similar but digital that accumulates actions in a similar way.