Help Reading a Pattern

[Jeanine]

How do you do this Rope Stitch?  I can’t figure it out.  

[Granny Square]

I'm not sure how to explain it - first, do you understand what a fptr and bptr are?  THAT's the hard part.  The rope stitch is a post stitch cluster, as far as I can tell, in the manner of a front post st from the point of view of how the hook goes around the post that anchors the cluster.

If you have never done a cluster, probably the weirdest thing (the first time) is : let's forget the post part, and just say a plain 3 TR cluster made in a stitch.  You make 1 TR into a stitch but do not complete the last yo and pull thru; do this again, so you have 2 incomplete TRs on your hook (will be 3 loops, there's always 1 more loop than stitches for a cluster), and for the third triple, complete it by pulling thru all the loops.  For your pattern, instead of doing this in a stitch, you are doing it around a stitch's post.  

If what I just said was confusing, there are lots of youtubes on post stitches and clusters; sometimes a little movie is worth 1000 words.  It's a lot more complicated to type it all out, and read and try to imagine it, than to actually DO it.