Rope Knot Doorstop

I have the privilege of sharing a tutorial with you, as I recently received an email from a reader who created an awesome knockoff but is not a blogger.

Elizabeth tried her hand at knot tying to create this rope knot doorstop for $15.00.

Elizabeth was inspired by the Rope Knot Doorstop from Ballard Designs which retails for $45.00.

Now here’s how Elizabeth pulled off her knockoff doorstop:

Step 1. Gather together your materials (tennis ball, 1500 BBs to add weight, about 10 feet of 3/8” diameter manila or sisal rope, exacto knife or box cutter, drill, and hot glue to hold the rope in place if needed).

Step 2. To add weight, Elizabeth first filled a tennis ball with 1500 shot BBs (like those used in a BB gun). To insert the BBs, she drilled a hole using a 3/8” bit.

Getting the BBs into the tennis ball was a bit more challenging than expected, so she still had to manually push a lot of the BBs inside the ball.

Step 3. Elizabeth then used a 3/8″ diameter manila rope to create a monkey fist knot over the ball. She followed a video tutorial on YouTube to create the monkey fist knot. (I am sure most of you are experts in this field and will not need a tutorial, right?)

Because the tennis ball kept peeking its lovely neon green head through the rope, Elizabeth ended up doing 4 passes instead of 3 like shown in the video and using hot glue to hold the rope in place.

She suggests spray painting the tennis ball beforehand to sidestep this problem and wearing gloves to avoid slivers.

If you have small hands, you may have to seek the assistance of someone with, well, bigger hands to help hold the rope and tie the knot!

Step 4. Prop open a door and let the breeze in using your lovely new doorstop or even add to a shelf as a bookend.

Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for sharing your tutorial with us!