Store a Length of Rope on Your Keychain

Sometimes you need a piece of rope, but you don't have any with you. That is solved with this, it's 68cm of rope stored as a (bulky) <10cm key-chain.

All you need is the piece of rope. It could help to have something like a marlinespike, or a pen, to help with the last step, but with a bit of wiggling you should be fine without. The rope I used here is 6 mm thick and 68cm long.

Make a loop in the rope, have the "end" of the rope stick out a tiny bit compared to the loop, have the majority of the rope, the "lead" on the other side.

Remove the loop from your hand. You should now be holding three strands of rope in your hand. Start wrapping the lead around these three strands. Loop as tightly as possible.

You should end up with a bundle of rope, with on one end a loop sticking out (barely visible on the right here), we'll call this the loop-end. And on the other end you should have both ends of the rope, the "end" and the "lead", and another loop, we'll call this the knot-end.

It's possible you will arrive at this step with a different result. If you still have a lot of rope left, but nowhere to wrap it around, then you need to make the loop in the first step bigger and try again. If you run out of rope to wrap, but are not even close to the end, you should make the loop in step 1 smaller and try again.

We will now pull both ends, the "end" and the "lead", at the knot-end through the same loop. Start with the lead, then take the other end and put it on top of the lead, also through the loop (this will prevent it from getting pulled down in the next step).

Now take the loop at the loop-end, and pull on it. Be careful though! Pull on one side of this loop and you tighten the loop on the knot-end, pull on the other side and you could pull the end, sticking out of the knot-end, through the knot, you want to keep a little of this end sticking out. If you use the loop-end loop to tighten the knot-end loop properly, it will capture that end and it will lock securely.

It may take a couple of tries, but once you know the right starting loop length, it should be easy to knot it up again. Unwrapping the rope goes easiest from the loop end, This will result in a bit of a twisted tangle, so you will have to straighten it out before using.