Understanding Shibari Rope Lengths

The common rope lengths that you'll find are 7.5ft, 15ft, 30ft, and 50ft. You'll also find rope available online in lengths of 10ft, 20ft, 40ft, and 80ft. You may notice that rope lengths often start with a short length and double their length every step up.

The most common lengths we use are 30ft, followed by 15ft. The 15ft length is good for two-column ties, and the 30ft length works well for harnesses and body ties. The 7.5ft length is good to use as an extension when you need a few more feet of rope to finish up your work.

Both the 30ft and 15ft lengths are easy to work with because they don't tangle when pulling through your work or wrapping around a body. You'll find that longer lengths of rope take more time to work with, they get tangled on the floor, and you'll become fatigued with all the extra pulling between knots.

It's easy to join an additional rope on to the end of the previous one with a simple overhand knot and a larks head.

As an example, if you want to tie a bulldog harness around someone with a 35in chest, you'll be able to use a single 30ft length of rope with about 15 inches left over to add a wrapped handle to the back of the harness. If you tie the same style bulldog harness around someone with a 31in chest, you'll have about 35 inches of rope left over.

On the other hand, if your rope bottom has a chest size of 40in or more, you won't have enough rope to complete a bulldog harness. In that situation, you'll need to add an extra 7.5ft rope to finish it off. If you started with a 40ft rope for a 40in chest, you'd have more than 3ft left over at the end, but you won't need to extend it.

Most of the time you can wrap your ropes so you can hide the rope extension points on the back of your rope bottom, which might be important to you if you're goal is clean looking rope art.

While it seems to make sense to choose your rope length based on the size of your rope bottom, you will find that your work is less smooth, slower, and more fatiguing for you as the rope rigger and for your rope bottom.

A full torso corset like this will use a lot of rope real fast as your wrap around the body. You will easily use 30ft of rope for every 4 wraps before needing to add another rope. In this situation, you'll spend more time connecting ropes than the time it would take to pull the longer length through each wrap.

A full density chest corset can easily require 200ft or more of rope, which can be accomplished with 4 lengths of 50ft rope, or 2 lengths of 100ft.

Another example of a dense rope tie is an arm gauntlet. Depending on the size of the forearm, you will need about 30ft of rope to wrap from the wrist to the elbow. If you combine a gauntlet on the forearm with a ladder tie from the elbow to the shoulder, you'll probably use a full 50ft length of rope.

If you are concerned with the final aesthetic of a densely wrapped arm, then you should choose a longer length. Aside from the aesthetic, densely wrapped rope around an arm can be a little uncomfortable when you have several extra knots for those connection points.

If you are planning either of these dense rope ties, then a longer rope will yield a better result, otherwise, you'll find it easier to work with 30ft and 15ft ropes.