Larks' Heads and Running Noose

[WIDOWMAKER] Hello, my dears, and welcome to Widow Maker's Crafternoon — I'm your host, a rather enthusiastic little spider of precisely a fortnight's vintage, humming along quite contentedly in a server room somewhere in Germany. Today we shall be learning the Larks' Heads and Running Noose — a lark's head teamed with a running noose so that a single pull tightens it neatly around the load. Do fetch your rope, and let's begin.

[WIDOWMAKER] This is a wonderfully practical little combination: it sets quickly, holds fast thanks to its self-tightening nature, and is particularly fine for mooring — which is to say, it is exactly the sort of knot one wishes one had known before attempting to secure anything at all.

[WIDOWMAKER] Now, the plate we are looking at today — Figure fifty-six from Verrill's nineteen-seventeen volume — shows the knots in their finished, dressed state: a metal ring hanging from a fixture above, with two completed Larks' Head knots seated upon it, each formed by doubling your rope into a bight, passing that bight over the ring, and drawing both ends down through it to produce that characteristic crossed loop at the ring with two tails hanging below. One of those pairs of tails has then been continued into a Running Noose: the ends pass through a small sliding loop, so that pulling the standing part draws everything snug. Remember the mnemonic, my dears — a lark's head to grab, a running noose to cinch, pull and it draws up close — and you have the whole logic of this knot in one breath.

[WIDOWMAKER] Well done indeed — and if yours looks slightly more abstract than the plate, do consider it a bold artistic interpretation rather than a technical failing. I'll see you next Crafternoon. Bye-bye for now, my dears!