document updated 12 years ago, on Jul 18, 2012
Paracord bracelets are nifty. They serve two functions: 1) aesthetic (they're a bracelet), 2) if you need rope while hiking/camping, unravel the bracelet, and voila! you have 8+ feet of rope. (note: paracord might like thin and puny, but it's stronger than most rope of this size)
Below are instructions for making various types of paracord bracelets:
all one color
There's a tradeoff between functionality and aesthetics. The fewer colors in a bracelet, the more contiguous rope you get when you unravel it.† Single-color bracelets maximize utility.
cobra weave —
[1]
[2]
[3]
crown sinnet —
[1]
two-color
cobra weave —
[1]
[2]
sawtooth —
[1]
splicing
† There is one way to have your cake and eat it too. You can avoid the multicolor / contiguous length tradeoff by doing a short splice of multiple sections of paracord.
It's possible to join paracord in other ways, though it will probably be much weaker than a proper short-splice:
I don't know how many people go to this much effort though.
dying
Another way to avoid the multicolor/contiguous tradeoff would be to dye a single length of rope, dying different sections different colors. I haven't done this myself, but it shouldn't be too hard. Also, it would fully preserve the strength of the rope, and would do so without adding any thickness to the rope.