Butterfly Knot

Photo 1: Make a coil of rope around your hand.

Photo 2: Make a second coil of rope around your hand.

Photo 3: Make three coils of rope around your hand.

Photo 4: Pick up the coil closest to your wrist.

Photo 5: Lay it over the top of the other two coils.

Photo 6: Repeat with the coil that is now closest to your wrist.

Photo 7: Lay the coil closest to your wrist over the top of the other two strands in your palm.

Photo 8: Keeping hold of that strand, pull extra slack into a strand to form a bight that will slide all the way under the other two strands.

Photo 9: Push the bight behind the other two strands laying across your palm.

Photo 10: Slide your hand out, keeping the strands in place.

Photo 11: Tighten the knot by pulling the strands on either side of it.

Photo 12: The butterfly knot with a locking carabiner.

Advantages

Designed to be weighted in either direction (whereas a figure 8 on a bight is meant to be weighted in one direction)

Unties easily after being fully weighted.

Easily adjustable by feeding slack through it.

Can be difficult to remember how to tie, which is why we are reviewing it here!

A coil in the rope wraps around an object or air without crossing itself.
A hitch is only a hitch if it goes around something else! A knot can stand alone.
The standing end of a hitch or knot is the one that’s standing there, not doing much, while the other end, the working end, gets knotted or hitched into a functional form.
A bight is a fold in the rope where the strands end up next to each other; a loop is a fold in the rope where one strand crosses the other.
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