| To
make the Trinity knot, you will need a compass and a piece of regular paper.
Be sure to protect your working table underneath from the point of the
compass, or the compass will dig little holes! Make a fair sized circle
on the page, say at least two inches in diameter. Make sure there is a
bit of room around the circle yet on your page, as the resulting knot when
we are done will be slightly larger than this initial circle. Do not adjust
your compass after you have drawn this circle, as we will need it to be
the same size for the next circles we draw. |
|
| Mark
the circle at approximately the twelve o'clock position. Place the point
of the compass on this point and use it to make marks where it crosses
our initial circle on each side. You do not have to draw the whole circle,
just where it would cross our first circle. |
|
| Now
place your compass on one of the marks you have just made, it doesn't matter
which one you do first. Draw a semi-circle within our initial circle. It
should start at the twelve o'clock point and end in the lower quarter of
the circle. You don't have to continue the arc outside of the initial circle,
you only need to draw what falls within our starting circle. |
|
| Make
the other arc the same as you did the first one. The two arcs should cross
at the centre point of your circle. If they don't, check to make sure you
have not changed your compass setting...it should still be the same size
as our first circle. |
|
| Placing
your compass point on the lower tailing end of one of your arcs, mark off
another tic on the bottom on the circle. You don't need to do a mark on
either side of the arc tail, just on the lower half. If you want to verify
your dimensions, you can put your compass on the other arcs tail and check
to see that it would make a mark in the same place on the bottom of the
circle, but you shouldn't have to. So long as you've kept the compass size
the same it should all line up. |
|
| Place
your compass on this bottom mark and draw another arc from side to side
within the circle. This is the basic skeleton of the Trinity knot, and
all we have left to do is double up the lines and erase our overs and unders. |
|
| Enlarge
your compass diameter now, by however much you'd want the thickness of
the strands of your knot to be. Place the compass point back onto the marks
we made in the upper half of the circle. From each point, draw another
arc within our circle, and extending a bit beyond. It is important
now to make sure that you extend the arcs a bit outside of the circle,
so they will meet up when the arcs are all drawn. Draw these new arcs from
both of the upper marks, and from the mark on the bottom as well. |
|
| Pick
a point where one of your knot strips intersects another, and make it pass
over
the other, erasing the under lines from the "under" strip from within your
"over" strip. The next pass for the knot strip, following the same strand,
will be to go under the next intersection, so erase appropriately.
The last pass will again be
over, so erase the underneath one. |
|
| At
this point the initial circle can be removed, as well as the marks for
our arcs. You can place your Trinity knot within a circle by using the
centre point of the old circle, and making it whatever size you want. It
also fits nicely within an equilateral triangle, or you can let stand alone. |
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