How to Tie a Paracord Snake Knot

Hey YouTube friends, Survival Craft here. This is my EDC bag and I've got it wedged between two sets of books so that it doesn't flip and flop on me while I teach you how to make a paracord snake knot. This is a decorative knot that's really good for paracord lanyards, for necklaces, for keychains, and as we'll see today, for zipper pulls. You're going to need a few things for this project, the greatest of which of course is paracord. So cut yourself off a 20 inch section of paracord and melt the ends so that it doesn't fray and that's going to give you enough to create a zipper pull with a five level snake knot. Now there will be some excess at the bottom, don't worry about it, we're going to snip that off at the end. You're going to need it though for tensioning the knots. You're also going to need a cutting device. I prefer Fiskar scissors and you're going to need a lighter. I prefer Bic. So first things first, run your paracord through your zipper and you're going to want to make sure that there's even lengths on both sides. So since this is a 20 inch piece, you're going to want to make sure that there's 10 inches on either side. Then you want to take the paracord on the left hand side and create a loop. And this loop is going to go behind itself. Make sure you put it behind. Then take your right hand side and run that paracord through the loop. See how I've done that? Just run it right through. Leave a little bit of excess over here, you're fine. You don't have to tension it all the way up unless you want to. And then reach over, take the paracord that you just fed through, bring it back over, and run it through the front of that loop again. Okay, this is going to create a knot and you just want to tension that down wherever you want it to be. If you want it to be really close to the zipper, then tension it up. If you want it to be a little bit further away, I'm trying to match this one down here, then you want it to be a little bit further. Once you've pulled the ends and you made sure that this knot is nice and tight, then all you have to do is you have to keep doing it over and over again. So you want to make your loop again. Make sure it goes behind here. Then take your other piece, run it through, bring it back around, pull it through again, and just begin to tension it down. You can move that knot wherever you want to. In fact, I've got one over here that I use as a lanyard for a small Swiss Army knife that I've spaced out the knots every three quarters of an inch. So you can do whatever you want to with it. I want something that's tight though. Just keep working this knot. Keep pulling on the ends until it's nice and tight up against the one above it, and you've got your second. You just keep doing this over and over again until you have five here. Once you've gotten done with the fifth knot, which as you can see, it's one, two, three, four, and five. Once you're done with that fifth knot, then you're going to take the excess paracord down here, and you're going to really pull on it. You want to make sure that that knot is super tight. And the reason is, is because if you want to, for instance, cut the paracord off, let's say down here, and leave two little pigtails, then you're going to want that knot to be tight or else it's going to loosen up, and every one after it's going to loosen up. But if you, for instance, wanted to cut it up here, and then melt that little stub down so that it's kind of melded to that knot, you don't really have to worry as much about whether that knot's super tight or not, because the melting of the paracord is going to keep it from loosening. But in this case, I want those pigtails to stay. I want there to be a little bit extra to the end to give the knot a flare as well as length, because I'm going to be using this as a zipper pull. So I'm going to figure out where I want to cut it. I want there to be a good bit of length to this, and so I'm just going to snip it here and then melt down the ends. So this is the final product. This is what you get at the end. It provides you with a lot of grip here, because these knots have a lot of texture to them. Plus, it's just decorative, so it makes really good paracord bracelets if you ever want to make jewelry out of it. So I hope you guys like this video. This isn't the type of video I do very often, so I'm not exactly very good at explaining myself. But I wanted to show you how to do this, because I love these type of knots. And if you have any questions or comments about this, put them in the comment section below, and I'd love to help you out. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Also, if you haven't already, please subscribe to the Survival Craft channel. And if you would, please like this video if you did like it. As always, thank you guys for watching, and have a great day.