Cable ties, duct tape, velcro etc are all great and useful tools to have available, but none of them beats the sheer flexibility and reusability of rope and string. But the classic presentation of knots isn’t very friendly to geeks, who want to understand what’s going on under the hood and see the connections between ideas. Starting from the simplest nontrivial knot and building up, this workshop will teach you a useful set of knots that will cover most situations, show you some tricks for modifying knots to achieve different effects, and maybe even get you designing knots from first principles. This is not a workshop about decorative knotwork, or a workshop on the mathematics of knot theory. All example applications will be SFW. There will be no confusing stories about rabbits and trees.