Bind

you cannot pull the rope on. you can only turn the wood.

a turned wooden figure on a finite rope: turn it to wind, and the grain darkens only where it turned

The rope here has one fixed end, on a peg in the wall, and it can never be pulled onto the wood. It arrives only where the surface has rotated past that peg, which makes coverage a record of rotation rather than something you apply. Because the length of rope a turn costs is the radius at the point of contact times the angle turned, the same quarter turn spends three times as much on the belly of the figure as it does on a neck -- so a finite rope goes much further if you spend it where the wood is thin. Turning back and forth over one band costs rope and gains no new surface, which is the other half of the same rule.

Concepts: spin, geometry.

An interactive you play with one thumb, on Wundr.