Rope Starter
Once you have a good grasp of the main safety points and communication concepts, you’ll need some rope and a little bit of vocabulary to get ready to learn your first tie.
Your First Rope
To get started, there are many types of rope that will do! Most Rope365 tutorials were made with 8m jute ropes of 6mm diameter. Each type of rope has different characteristics; hemp, jute, nylon or cotton ropes of 7-10m in length with a 5-7mm diameter are all great for bondage. Week 7 contains many activities to help you discover the best rope for you, but it can be difficult to know your preferences before learning a few ties. To start, 8m long cotton rope of 6mm diameter is recommended. It is cheap, easy to wash, and available in most hardware stores.
If you want to expand your options, check out the Rope Shopping guide.
Anatomy of a Rope
Let’s look at the rope and a few words we will use to describe the different parts of a rope.
- Bight – U-shaped arc of rope, usually the middle
- Tail – The part of the rope away from the bight that we haven’t tied with yet
- Loop – When the rope crosses itself to make a circle
- Overhand knot – Simple stopper knot made by passing the one end of the rope through a loop
Rope has been around for a while, from sailing to bondage with a detour via macrame, this creates a huge legacy on the vocabulary. The more foundational concepts tend to have acquired many names, and sometimes the same word can have different meanings from one community to another. For the sake of simplicity, we try to stick to one term per concept while mentioning alternate names. Which one was chosen is often a subjective choice and is a reflection of the period of time these texts were written. Language is fluid and continues to evolve. The vocabulary section of the Rope365 website will aim to capture some of this complexity in the long run.
Or skip directly to Spring to get hands-on with tying.
Or return to Getting Started for more options.
Credit: R/P: Ebi McKnotty