Snake knot lanyard

I made this lanyard following instructions on Stormdrane's blog. Attaching two different paracords together was tricky and I ended up with the frayed end showing up a little. I also realized that this knot can easily get undone and thus ended up gluing the ends with crazy glue. I have made a few more since then and I modified the technique a little.
As Stormdrane mentions on his website, if you use crazy glue to glue two cords together the joint becomes very stiff and hard to knot. So I included this glued section in the straight part of the cord around which the knot is tied. So you end up with two different colored loops at the end of the lanyard, which is not a big deal for me.

Monkey's fist

The earbuds cord which came with my Treo is very long and it gets snagged on things when I am wearing it. Thus I decided to make a Monkey's fist in the middle of it to reduce it's length. Initially I used a wooden bead as the center of the knot but it was too light. So I ended up using a ball bearing to give it some weight. Many moons later when I discovered the wonderful website instructables.com I found an instructable to do just that.

Long Turk's Head on mini-maglite

I made this long Turk's head (16L3B) after viewing (and re-re-re-viewing) Stormdrane's video tutorial. I used some kind of cotton cord on Perma-Lok needle. It took a while to get it right but I am happy with the results. This was a rather stiff cord and I didn't have enough of it to go around one more time. What I realized is that the so called "fairing" of the knot can be a real challenge if your cord or the substrate on which you are tying the knot is rough. As you can see I was not entirely successful in straightening the knot.

Rope Mats

I was introduced to knotting when my son was a cub scout. There he learnt some simple and some complicated knots including Turk's head knot. As time went on he moved onto other things but I was hooked. I tried some simple knots and bought my first knot book "The ultimate encyclopedia of knots and ropework" by Geoffrey Budworth. This is a beautifully illustrated book and I have found it extremely useful.
Above is a picture of rope mats I made a long time ago using instructions in this book. I used synthetic rope I found in Lowe's. Since the rope is very soft, they (the mats), however, do not hold well to handling. So I have bought stiffer rope to duplicate these knots. I will post pictures once I have completed that set.