Ancient Web: Jo Edkins Taught Celtic Knots with a Felt Tip and a Grid

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Celtic knotwork looks impossibly elaborate until Jo Edkins hands you two felt-tip pens and suggests drawing a few crossing lines.

Visit Jo Edkins's Celtic Knots lessons.

Her index, copyright dated 2003, is a small illustrated course that branches in several directions. It teaches pen-and-paper methods, copying existing designs, constructing knots from dots, making circular or triangular patterns, and working on computers. Other sections collect real examples from the Isle of Man, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, and Northumberland.

The site's most approachable felt-tip method starts with pale broad lines. Dark outlines then follow the strands, leaving small gaps where a line passes underneath another. Finally the artist connects loose ends or turns them into a head and tail. Edkins explains that a child can use the method, and shows a child's knot-like octopus as evidence of the technique's flexibility.

The mathematics hides inside the decoration

Edkins is interested in more than drawing attractive loops. She explains how the parity of a grid affects whether the result can become one continuous strand. Even-by-even crossings may leave loose ends; different choices of joining can produce multiple strands.

Her later Why Celtic Knots Work page makes the reasoning more explicit. By tracing clockwise and anticlockwise arrows around gaps, she shows why a correctly built pattern alternates over and under at crossings. An internal dead end disrupts the rule, while an external loose end does not necessarily do so.

The index also distinguishes Celtic designs from a broader family of interlacing patterns. Edkins points to Roman mosaics, Viking and Saxon work, Islamic patterns, Tibetan endless knots, manuscripts, and actual tied knots. The label 'Celtic' is convenient, but the geometry belongs to more than one tradition.

This is an unusually satisfying example of old-web pedagogy: plain pages, many small pictures, no account to create, and explanations that do not hide how the result was made.

The original 2003 lessons remain accessible alongside later additions, and the site links Edkins's other specialist projects on mazes and mosaics.

Try the felt-tip lesson or explore the full index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.