I am belong to a community (the EarthSpirit Community) that does a lot of celebration of the spirit, and represents spirituality, through the use of fiber arts, cordage, and the symbolism of string and rope

Because of the way that my wife works for this community behind the scenes as a logistics and operations manager, though, I’m aware — all too aware — of the ways in which these ceremonies generate a lot of leftover organic and ethically sourced string, rope and cordage, that still has nowhere to go.

From time to time, I have gone looking for ways to solve this problem. And I might just have hit on one, finally: the rope club or rope stick.

as can be seen from the first picture, the rope club is actually two instruments of wood. One piece is a stick with a hole in it, and a carved hourglass bit at one end. The other is a dowel that fits in the hole, with a wooden block firmly attached to the end. A loop of string is placed over the hourglass, so that it hangs off the narrow end. The other end of the loop is attached to a fixed point, like a tree trunk, or a post on the porch of my house.

You stand at a place where there is some tension in the line, and start spinning the hourglass board around the dowel, which adds twist to the line or loop of string. If you spin clockwise, this is adding S spin to the line. When the cord starts to Double up on itself, you stop, walk to the end that’s on the fixed point, and loop up the string. Then you start up the rope club in the opposite direction, counterclockwise, adding Z twist. You end up with a three ply rope, that doesn’t need to have its ends whipped — one end is already tied off, and the other end has built-in loops in it. You can of course clip/cut those off, and whip-tie the ends with alternating colored string; but you don’t have to.

I don’t know that this is exactly a solution to some of the challenges that we faced with all the extra cordage and yarn we produce in our rituals. But it strikes me as one part of the way in which we can recycle these materials

To do that, though, I may have to make a dozen or so of these rope clubs, and enlist a dozen other people or more into the work of turning our yarn leftovers into the cottage needed for next year’s ceremonies. It’s not the best tech for making rope, either, out of our leftovers. I may need to make a rope-reel for that project instead.

How to Make a Rope Club

A rope club consists of two parts. One is a board about one foot long. This part has an “hourglass shape” cut or rasped or filed out of one end, and a hole drilled in the board just below that. I used a length of 1×2″ board for this purpose, and my hole was about 3/4″ in diameter.

The other is a dowel with a fixed head, so that it can slide easily into the other board through the hole, and not come loose. I did this with an oak dowel and a scrap of 1×2′ from cutting the other piece down to size; the head is “glued and screwed” in place, with both a round hole drilled partway through the board, and a screw to keep it in place. The screw is long enough to go through the dowel all the way, and back into the wood of the head on the opposite side.

Let’s see… what tools did I use to make this? A drill with a 3/4″ Forstner bit, for making the hole in the head for the dowel. The same bit, for making the hole in the board. A rasp, for widening and smoothing the hole, and the cutouts of the hourglass part. I used a coping saw to cut out the narrowing bits of the hourglass, and a straight saw to cut the board and dowel to length. I also used a small block plane to chamfer the edges of the boards, the dowel, and the head of the dowel.

I don’t think measurements matter very much. The whole “hourglass and dowel hole” should be well north of the midpoint of the board. The weight of the board helps with maintaining the spin as you put twist into the rope, so you don’t want the board to be too short — but you also don’t want the board to be too long, because you have to support that weight with your hand and arm as you twist up the rope. Similarly, the dowel-and-head is a handle, so it has to be long enough for the board to spin around the handle, and for you to hold it — but not so long that it becomes unwieldy. Try a foot-long section of dowel, and then see if that works well; you can shorten it in later versions.