You might be asking why I entrust my life to "just" two dozen strands of Patience.
My family raised me on spinning, weaving, and knitting. It is good practice for a Patience child to instinctively understand how string works from such a young age.
Have you ever tried to pick up some loose wool in your hands? When you pull it apart, the strands slide past each other and result in you holding two puffs of wool, one in each hand. Spin them into yarn, though, and suddenly they can rely on the strength of the other strands, as they are all tangled up and pressing against each other. It takes orders of magnitude more strain to break a strand of yarn.
Thus I came up with an idea: could I make my own strings stronger by twisting them together? So I summoned nine, S-twisted them in bundles of three, and Z-twisted the bundles together. I tested the results with increasingly heavy objects for weeks. The rope did indeed work far better than the original strings did. But it was barely prehensile at all; the strands were pointing in every direction and flailed when I tried to mentally move them. In the early days I had to physically lash my rope together with normal string every so often to keep it from unraveling.
Then I decided to test myself by rappelling down from a castle battlement.
In hindsight this was a stupendously reckless decision on my part, but I was young, and young people often believe themselves to be invincible. It took several rough landings for myself to figure out how to do so. I learned that you cannot just make a rope strong enough to support your weight; it has to be strong enough to catch you midair while you are panicking and falling, an act of immense mental discipline. Meanwhile, a sailor taught me to tie more secure knots - important because the lack of prehensile ability meant I could not just curl the end around an anchor, as most Patience users might.
Between that, and spending so much of my childhood in the woods near where I grew up - catching bullfrogs and studying moss - I became interested in treetops.
This being said, I braid my strings now, rather than just twisting them together. Why? The surface of the resulting rope is smoother. It is less likely to snag on uneven bark and stray thorns. It takes me longer to do, but it's worth it for the extra stability. And because the pattern is so regular, I have been able to curl the end around supports to hang onto them, making me less reliant on knots.
I'm always looking for more ideas, of course.
