Barber Pole Turks Head Bottle Opener

Hope the New Year finds every one well. It's been busy here in southern Maine with a dumping of snow, back to work, back to school for the kids, a new Homebrewing Kit and the like. I've spent most evenings since my return from visiting the family for the holidays cross country skiing which has been very enjoyable. As the snow has gotten more crunchy I finally sat down with some string.

This is a business promotional bottle opener I picked up at an open house recently. As far as business promotion widgets go, it's of fairly good quality and made of stainless steel. Around it is tied a variation of a barber pole turks head. If you poke around the web you can find some very complicated and impressive versions of the barber pole turks heads. This version is tied as a standing turks head, using 1 strand for each bight with 8 strands total- I simply zip tied the stands to the bottle opener rather than monkeying with a mandrel (I rarely use mandrels). When the initial helix of strands was made, all I did was alternate the colors and started tucking each end in the same pattern from one end to the other. There are a couple tutorials on Knot Heads World Wide for barber pole turks heads using only two stands. They can be found here and here.