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.

ten days later she comes rolling into town

Apologies. My mother's old house in the country where I sometimes spend a bit of time has internet, but not the free-floating wireless lan kind of internet and it is not allowed too complicated to hook up my computer to the internet there is. I also don't mind periods without the net for a while if I can just have some time to re-internet afterwards. I thought about composing a blog post to post when I came back, but didn't feel like it. I was in a murderous mood, after all.

I don't know how many kilograms of dandelions I pulled from the ground with the help of my trusty sword the gardening tool I have no English name for, but I managed to clear a lot of ground. After determining that extermining every little sprig of dandelion would lead to madness and would require at least a month or so, I attacked the big fat ones which were already preparing to blossom and take over even more of the garden. In this I was successful. On my last day there, I even ate salad made from the most delicious dandelion leaves and buds that I had selected. I really wanted to take the salad bowl outside to show the other dandelions that I was a barbarian who would eat them all if they didn't stop from spreading, but it became dark and rainy outside and I didn't feel like it anymore.

Apart from battling dandelions, I cut the roses, the lavender, the spreading Fallopia baldschuanica and raked dead leaves and grass out of a sad, neglected little patch of garden. I also dug some holes for concrete blocks which are supposed to hold a wooden platform. I didn't leave the garden much. And I didn't take any pictures of the plants, either. Unusual.

I did, however, take pictures of plants in Bonn. Pictures of buildings and other things, too. The building above is one of the buildings of Bonn University from the garden side. It used to be a palace of the archbishop of Bonn. The university also uses another palace and several beautiful buildings in another part of Bonn.

But I won't give you a complete tour of my trip, just a few pictures. On the left is the cloister of the Bonner Münster from the 12th century. I really liked the way they had designed the garden and the capitals of the columns were also very beautifully carved with leaves and animals.

Searching for a supermarket, I found the most beautiful street in Germany. At least in spring. It's the Heerstraße in Bonn and would be one reason for me to move there. 500 meters of pink cherry trees. You can see it even in this picture - the light under the trees is pink!

Now about knitting. I did take some knitting to Bonn - luckily, because I had already finished my book in the train on the way to Bonn. Out of two balls of Lana Grossa Alta Moda Estate, I knit a neat kerchief with a slip stitch pattern that gave me a bit of a headache, but managed to make the knitting more interesting.

I named it Bonna, thinking about the Romans that had puttered around there for a while, before they built a big fort. Bonn also is the birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven and if it hadn't been the capital of Western Germany for 41 years and the capital of Germany for another 9, it would just be a lovely little town on the Rhine, overshadowed by the much larger Cologne. As it is, it has a large number of museums and government buildings and interesting, very different areas.

I also knit in the country and discovered that I won't need as much i-cord on 250 as I thought. Maybe not any, we'll see. The skirt of 250 is finished which enabled me to determine that the sleeves will actually be longer, because I have an extra ball of yarn to spend on them. Then I unraveled the top and thought about its construction. I think making side increases and then decreasing them again to make a sort of diamond shape might be the way to ensure that I have enough space for my boobs, but smaller armholes. We'll see, I'm not above unraveling the top again if I don't like it.

With those beautiful early medieval cups from the Rheinische Landesmuseum in Bonn (note the bunny on the left), I wish you happy Easter and shall go off to knit a little - unfortunately my right hand is a bit sore from gardening, so I need to be careful.