Two Knotty Boys Showing You the Ropes — Review

When I think of the big instruc­tional rope rig­gers, sev­eral names come to mind…Chanta Rose, Midori, Jay Wise­man, Lochai…and of course, the Two Knotty Boys. I’ve been a long­time fan of their instruc­tional videos and I really can’t believe it took me so long to get my hands on their book, Two Knotty Boys Show­ing You the Ropes!

With plenty of illus­trated easy to fol­low step by step instruc­tions, the book would be great for pretty much any­one want­ing to learn more about rope tech­nique, from curi­ous begin­ners to sea­soned experts. The Knotty Boys style of rope work is unique and rather dif­fer­ent from tra­di­tional Japan­ese bondage tech­niques like Shibari. Instead the Knotty Boys focus on clever func­tional ties that can incor­po­rate beau­ti­ful knot work. I espe­cially liked the sec­tion on func­tional bondage where dif­fer­ent ties show how to secure some­one to a table or chair or how to tie a har­ness for sex toys- I find that, a lot of times, this is the kind of bondage I need to know, but it isn’t some­thing nec­es­sar­ily taught in fancy Japan­ese rope books.

The Knotty Boys do go over the dif­fer­ent types of rope avail­able, but they do not really go into what kind of rope they, them­selves, use for their bondage. This is actu­ally more impor­tant than it seems, because D and I usu­ally use tra­di­tion­ally rougher ropes like jute (and hemp, which we do not use because of my hemp oil allergy). These rougher ropes do not work well with many of the Knotty Boys ties. Their rope work requires a more slip­pery rope, like nylon, so we found that a lot of the ties that we tried out, like an arm­binder, really didn’t work very well with our rougher tex­tured rope. I also wish that the pho­tog­ra­phy in the book were in color rather than black and white — I’m used to the gor­geous pho­tog­ra­phy in Midori’s book, and the black and white seemed drab and lack­lus­ter to me.

All of that being said, I’m actu­ally a pretty big fan of Two Knotty Boys Show­ing You the Ropes. In fact, and this may come as a shock to many who know me as a tra­di­tion­al­ist rope snob, I’m actu­ally look­ing for some nice higher qual­ity nylon rope to add to my col­lec­tion, specif­i­cally so that I can do some of the beau­ti­ful ties that fea­ture heav­ily in this book! I’d rec­om­mend this book to any­one inter­ested in “learn­ing the ropes” and want­ing to try  some­thing dif­fer­ent but equally beau­ti­ful. I hear that there’s another Knotty Boys book in the works, and you can be sure that it will have a place on my book­shelf, as well!