Standard vs. turk's head monkey fists

Here are three monkey fists but two of them started as turk's heads. The brown one is tied using this standard method - 3 times around creates a 1" diameter fist. The red and orange are 3 lead 5 bight turk's heads which also become 1" diameter fists. I used the photos in The Complete Book of Knots and Ropework as a guide to tie these.

I tie the standard monkey fist using a jig (made from a coat hangar) then drop a 9/16" wood ball in the center.

The turk's head I first tie around a hammer handle, then I work the slack out and slide the knot off and tighten it around a 1/2" wood ball.

I get the wood balls from my local Michaels or you can go directly to Lara's Crafts.

My new monkey fists

I recently got back into doing monkey fists. A guy emailed me about his project which was to use monkey fists as zipper pulls for his Maxpedition Jumbo Versipack. So I started doing monkey fists again. It had been a couple years or so since I worked through my last one so it took me a good length of paracord to get back in the groove.

They were fun to do but I had never sold them so I had never worked out some of the basics like - how much paracord do I start with, how much paracord makes up the finished monkey fist, what size wood ball to use in the center, should I melt the ends or use glue or both? Stuff like that.

So it took a few nights but I figured most of that out. And here's a few of the final monkey fists.

You can see more pics here.