Japanophile

Sakura in Bonn - you already saw those

That's me. Not an entirely uncritical one (#not a weeabo), but there are many things I like about Japan and Japanese culture. And what do you get when you mix pink cotton yarn, summer weather and a Japanophile knitter? Something called Sakura - after the cherry blossoms that are revered and celebrated every spring in Japan.

See, Austria is currently experiencing a draught and the weather is too warm to knit with wool. 250 and Quittez are languishing. The Rose-Colored Edge shawl is waiting for a different yarn for its edging. I also have about a bazillion summer scarves, but no summer shawl. And when it gets drafty, a scarf protects the neck, but not the upper back.

What to do? A stash crawl revealed some pink cotton lace yarn (Lang yarns Marisa, to be exact). Five balls of it, a little more than 1000 meters. Great! Its color is quite reminiscent of cherry blossoms, so why not design a lace shawl that looks like cherry blossoms?

Most common depiction of sakura petals

But that's easier said than done. The first obstacle is the fact that cherry blossoms and their stylized appearance are difficult to translate into knitting.

Cherries belong to the genus of Prunus and their blossoms have five petals like almond, apricot, peach and plum blossoms. While the blossom as a whole is still symmetrical and an image of the outline can definitely be expressed in knits and purls as in this washcloth, in lace it's much harder.

To get an accurate sakura blossom in the easiest way, you'd either need to start at the center or from the outside in, that way, the five petals can be expressed accurately. But even then, the shape of the petals is tricky, since the most common depiction of the petals shows them as having a dent at the top.

Unblocked Hanami

Crochet actually manages to replicate flowers of all kinds much better than knitting (see crocheted sakura here and here), but I didn't want to crochet a shawl.

There are quite a few sakura-themed knitting patterns out there. There's the beautiful Hanami Stole by Melanie Gibbons, the first knitting pattern I ever bought. I had to wait for years before I could lay my hands on proper lace yarn for this (got it from KarlaA).

Some more patterns: Grace Mcewen designed a Sakura scarf by focusing on the twigs, rather than the blossoms. And then there's always the possibility of knitting something, making little blossoms and attaching them like in this pattern by Sara Parelhoff. But I wanted lace sakura blossoms!

 

So far, I've tried two different approaches. The first one was inspired by the Vinca shawl by Miriam Felton. Starting the shawl at the center with a sakura blossom - why not? I used the wrong needles (4mm is too large) but it turned out pretty well, I thought.

The finished shawl was supposed to look something like the incredibly crappy drawing on the left. But the blossom at the center of my shawl isn't that large.

To make the blossom larger, I'd need to figure out the increases, but all the math in my brain has been replaced by anime history. How to fill in the rest? More petals? The petals and their increase and decrease ratio are also tricky and I haven't found a pleasing solution for further petals yet. You can see that I tried, but it just didn't work out that well.

So I started a second try. Conventional shawl architecture, triangle shawl, top down, garter stitch. And I discovered that the violet pattern (at right) that I put to good use in my Tegami Bachi cowl looks quite nice when it's done in garter stitch. By virtue of the shawl construction, it becomes tilted and so more like sakura blossoms than violets (see below).

Well, *I* think they kinda look like sakura ...

Ultimately, I think a combination of these two patterns might do the trick. Starting out at the center with my sakura blossom, I could then do garter stitch or actually stockinette and use the violet pattern and random lace-overs to add random blossoms and petals.

Once the shawl is done (I'm already afraid of the decrease count for those two triangle bits), I'd add a garter stitch border on the top and a lacy border on the bottom (leaves, I think). That way I'll get the Sakura Shawl I wanted, unless the part of me that is thinking "pink ... lace ... flowers = frill overload" wins and I chuck the whole thing.

and so there were socks

I jumped headfirst into my yarn stash, looked at my box of sock yarn and my pile of patterns and finally came up with these. The pattern is Nutkin and I call them Suncream socks because ... don't the colors remind you of sunscreen bottles? I remember, in our old bathroom on the top of the wooden shelf that held all my dad's toiletries, there was a collection of sunscreen bottles. Like these (only older):

 The socks look like these bottles. Very 70s. Very nostalgic. What - no fashionable mood board with ... I don't know, oranges and pictures of the ocean and ... coconut palm tree trunks? Or ... who knows, an old coffee ad? Nope, the dust-covered sunscreen bottles that I saw almost every morning and every evening for about 20 years or so, those made me want to knit with this yarn.


I modified the pattern a little, because the cuff had all sorts of instructions (stockinette, purl line, fold over, knit together with provisional cast-on ... too much work) and I decided to do Japanese shortrows for the heel (a waste of time for sock heels, sadly), but on the whole, the pattern is simple and easy, just what I wanted. The second sock is done already, too (well, it *has* been two weeks since my last post).

It's getting far too hot to knit with wool in Vienna, though. I'm thinking about starting a cotton shawl (because I don't have enough stuff on the needles, nooooo), but I don't know which pattern I should use. The yarn is pink and I'd love to do something cherry blossom-themed (since I'm such a Japanophile), but it is dang hard to replicate sakura in knitting.

I'd also like to finish my Rose-colored Edges Shawl (the grey blob on the right), but recently I decided that the pink yarn for the edges was too good to be just an edge. Now what? Well ... Lana Grossa supposedly is bringing out a lace yarn, so I'll have to visit my favorite yarnstore very soon.

Meanwhile, it's back to the country with me for the weekend ... more cleaning.
 

how about some socks?

Having three big projects on the needles is sometimes a little boring. I want to knit socks ...

Project 250 is going slow, but ok so far. After figuring out the armscye problem (and I finally remembered that the "skirt" is called a "peplum"), I wondered whether a diamond shape wouldn't solve the problem, giving me space and yet smaller armholes. So I completely unraveled the top and went to work. As you can see below, instead of a giant v, there's a somewhat diamond- or leaf-shaped section now. But!

But when I tried it on after knitting a good bit, I noticed that there was another problem. Instead of right below my armpit, the diamonds were placed further to the front. No wonder, since I don't have boobs on my back! But undoing all that knitting again? Instead, I chose to drop down the diamond section and reknit it 10 stitches further back.

The herringbone pattern is a bit complicated to knit back up, though, because the increases are unusual. Every row needs undivided attention, the only thing I could do was listen to a little music while reknitting. Still, the second section is almost done.

 To the right, you can see how far back I put the diamond section now - it's well into the back of the garment. I'm curious to see how it will all work out. But once the reknitting is done, I'll have to figure out a new problem: the new neckline. In accordance with the new look, my 250 cardi needs a new neckline to make it more Jane Austen than Jane Eyre. So I'll have to look at different patterns with the sort of neckline that I want and incorporate that into the cardi.

 
Sounds like a lot of work, no? Well, when I'm not working on 250, I'm working on my entrelac stole, called Quittez vos habits roses. When I can't think of a good enough name for a project (Why do they have to have such great names, anyway? Maybe I should start numbering them all.) I use snippets from folk songs (because I'm crazy about folk) and since I recently discovered a good channel for French folk songs, the titles of my projects are getting more and more incomprehensible. Quittez vos habits roses is from the song below, called "Marlborough s'en va t'en Guerre" from the beginning of the 18th century. 

If that song reminds you of "For he's a jolly good fellow", that's because the Brits stole the melody of this song and added their own text, a common and fun occurrence in folk. Most tunes for folksongs were actually dance tunes before they became song tunes. It's rare for melodies to cross borders, though, so this was a great find for me.

Anyway, back to knitting. On the left you can see my Quittez, it's made of Lana Grossa Qui and is soft and gorgeous, but due to my tendency to tighten my gauge once I'm comfortable with a pattern, the beginning of the stole is much looser than the section I'm currently knitting. Maybe in the future I should switch needles when this happens. But I'm hoping that it will even out in the blocking. Sadly, I've always found that the great texture of entrelac gets lost in the blocking, but maybe scrunching it up a little will help.

The other thing about Quittez is that I need daylight to knit it. Once one row of squares is done, I need to go back to every square and adjust the stitches. I still haven't managed to neaten up my edge stitches, not even with tugging and knitting some stitches tighter and some looser and whatever else - they remain uneven. So adjusting is required and for that I need daylight or at least good light in my room and ... anyway.


 
Third project on the needles is the Malagash Square Shawl that I'm calling Rose-colored Edges (because I didn't want to name it after yet another French folk song, frickin' a). It starts in the middle and is knit in the round and the pattern wants it to be garter stitch. But no way am I purling so much in a shawl that is knit in the round! And I also only have 600 meters of the main color, so I have to make it last.

So the main section has garter ridges every third row and three garter ridges every 7th ridge. I also wanted to do something with twisted stitches but decided against it. Maybe in a future project. But as this shawl gets bigger, it needs needles with a longer cable. Unfortunately, my best 3,5mm needles are occupied with the 250 cardigan, so I need to finish 250 first before I knit much more on this.

I want to knit socks ... I only have about 74 sock patterns in my queue ...