Warme Umhüllung

So, mein Gentle Cuddle ist fertig. Mit ein wenig Gefluche und viel Auftrennen. Nachdem ich jetzt schon einige Jacken für mich gestrickt habe, sehe ich langsam, wie ich Strickmuster auf mich anpassen muss, damit sie auch wirklich passen.

Wie hier beschrieben, basiert die Jacke auf dem Cubes Pullover - also zumindest die Zahlen für den Halsteil. Ich hatte mir die Größe L ausgesucht, denn ich habe endlich gemerkt, dass mein Rücken ja viel schmäler ist als meine Vorderseite. Als ich die 4. Reihe der Zunahmen fertig hatte, merkte ich, dass sie zu viel war. Es war einfach zu viel Stoff. Also trennte ich sie wieder auf und strickte gerade weiter und das war dann ok.

Aber ich habe jetzt auch gemerkt, dass die Distanz zwischen Schulter und Achselhöhle bei mir eigentlich nicht sehr groß ist. Von daher gibt es jetzt eine ausgeprägte Falte bei der Achsel, mit der ich halt leben muss. Die Ärmel gehen auch nicht ganz bis unter die Achselhöhle. Nächstes Mal experimentiere ich mal mit der kleinen Größe für den Anfang, vielleicht wird dann auch der Ausschnitt nicht ganz so riesig. Beziehungsweise gibt es ja auch die Methode, wo nur bei den Maschen für die Ärmel zugenommen wird ... aber da muss ich noch experimentieren.

Wahrscheinlich hätte ich ein paar der Maschen an den Ärmeln noch zum Körper dazugeben können. Schwierig wurde es mit den Taschen. Zuerst habe ich sie viel zu weit hinten angesetzt und mit den Körper mitgestrickt, aber das war keine gute Idee, sie wurden auch viel zu lang. Und die lila Wolle ist auch um einiges dünner als die graubraune, also habe ich den unteren Teil bis zur Farbgrenze wieder aufgetrennt und mehr Maschen zugenommen, damit auch mein Bauch genug Platz hat.

In der letzten Reihe vor dem Bündchen habe ich dann mit 2 Extraknäuelchen jeweils am Rand der Jacke über 20 Maschen doppelfädig gestrickt und die zusätzlichen 20 Maschen dann nach oben gestrickt. Oben bei der Farbgrenze angekommen reichte dann Kitchener Stitch, um die Tasche zu befestigen. Dann habe ich die Taschen noch eingefasst und dann war das untere Bündchen dran.

Als nächstes strickte ich die Knopfleisten, damit ich alles danach übriggebliebene Garn für die Ärmel verwenden konnte. Die Taschen waren an der Seite zur Knopfleiste noch offen, jetzt sollten sie geschlossen werden. Zuerst habe ich noch alle Fäden bei den Taschen vernäht, um mir später Mühe zu ersparen. Um auf der Innenseite nicht zu viel Material zu haben, was dazu führen könnte, dass die Knopfleiste nicht flach liegt, habe ich jeweils nur den äußersten Teil der Randmasche aufgenommen, normalerweise nehme ich die ganze Randmasche auf, damit alles ein wenig stabiler ist.

 

 Die Ärmel waren vergleichsweise einfach, ich musste nichts mehr auftrennen. Ich hatte noch ein paar recht kurze Restchen übrig und knotete sie alle aneinander, bis ich wieder ein kleines Knäuel hatte, aus dem habe ich dann vier kleine Fleckchen gestrickt, schräg, also mit einer Masche begonnen, daraus 2 gestrickt, in der nächsten Reihe aus einer Masche 2, also insgesamt 3 und dann am Rand immer zugenommen bis ich 9 Maschen hatte, in der Mitte ein Loch eingestrickt und dann wieder am Rand abgenommen bis 3 Maschen übrig waren, die 3 zusammengestrickt, aus.

Zusätzlich zu den 8 Knöpfen an der Knopfleiste nähte ich noch 4 Knöpfe an, die auch für sich allein gut aussehen. Ich wollte auch noch kleinere Knöpfe rundherum nähen, aber das wird glaube ich zu viel. Jedenfalls lassen sich die Flecken dranknöpfen. Die ganzen Enden und Knoten an den Fleckchen habe ich absichtlich nicht vernäht und ich finde das sieht ziemlich gut aus so.

Allerdings gibt mir das mit meinen Maßen schon zu denken. Wahrscheinlich sollte ich mich endlich mal komplett abmessen und diese Maße irgendwo notieren und dann jeweils Berechnungen anstellen, dann müsste ich nicht so viel auftrennen. Leider werden meine Maschenproben nie so, wie ich dann am kompletten Stück stricke. Auf jeden Fall bin ich sehr zufrieden mit der Jacke, sie ist schön, seeeehr warm - und ich habe die Wolle wirklich bis auf den letzten Fitzel aufgebraucht!

eight hands and four brains would be nice

Don't look at me like that. I've been sick with a horrible cold that refused to leave for two weeks. I've been busy working. Not only am I responsible for daily tasks at the library, I also am a crucial part of thinking up strategies and composing posts for their facebook page, so much of my urge to express myself has found a new channel (oh those poor people).

Yes, I'm at work here. It's a picture from one of my facebook campaigns.

And when I'm not at work, I go and play. Sometimes at the movies. Sometimes I just stay at home and have fun talks with my flatmates. Sometimes I go to other people's libraries.

Reading comics at an early Halloween night at a friend's library in another part of Austria.

And when I'm not playing at other people's libraries, I enjoy the return of my cooking and baking mojo (yes, there might be a recipe post coming up). I've acquired some essential ingredients for making Japanese food and have been successful in making not only edible, but actually pretty delicious lunchboxes (or bento) when I can be bothered to get up early.

Onigiri!

My first proper bento - isn't it awesome?

And after all that, there's still my PhD (got my first book for that), my broken camera, the grey weather resulting in lack of light and I had to wait for an opportunity to go yarn shopping to continue my projects.

Raspberry Broadside is one of those projects. I started out not knowing whether I'd add a second skein, but since the yardage of the Zitron Unisono is about a hundred meters shorter than your average sock yarn, I came to the conclusion that I simply had to add another skein. So I had to wait until I could go yarn shopping. But the wait was well worth it, since now I can use this as my commuting knitting again. It's not like I have a very long commute, but every minute I can spend on knitting counts!

Another project that needed a second skein of yarn is my Stripester. I haven't even started it properly yet, because the blue yarn gave me such a tough time and I didn't know what it wanted to be. I had been bitten by the long stretchy sideways triangle scarf bug and I couldn't stop. But Lace wasn't the answer for this one.

Then I thought it could be a Destroyed Cowl, but I just wasn't feeling it. For the Destroyed Cowl, I had to do a provisional cast-on, which I did in some black merino yarn that I had left lying around and looking at it, I noticed what a striking combination the black and blue made. So - a long, stretchy, striped sideways triangle scarf it would be. And yet I had to wait to go buy the black yarn and now that I have it, I need to finish my other scarves first.

But I couldn't *not* knit while waiting for yarn. And while playing around with the yarn that would become Raspberry Broadside, I hit upon a pattern I had always dreamed of. I think you might have noticed my great love of flowers, particularly roses. And maybe you've also picked up on my obsession with dark (or dusky) pink. And then, I really like lace.

I've had a beautiful dark, dusky pink lace yarn since last summer, but other than knowing I wanted to do something with lace and roses with it, I had no clue. I had collected a couple of rose-inspired lace patterns, among them the Travelling Roses scarf and so I simply started knitting a shallow sideways triangle scarf with that lace pattern. The Zitron Unisono wanted to be Raspberry broadside, but the pattern would be perfect for my pink lace yarn. I started knitting and currently it looks like this:

Of course it's called Rose Brocade. Once the main body is done, I will add a gentle ruffle. It will be gorgeous, I'm sure.

I've done something else as well. I started blocking some things. Like ... this:

My Cool Copycat shawlette from last winter - apparently many of my knitted things need at least a year to mature before they get blocked and worn. I've been wearing it a lot recently and even got a compliment on it yesterday. Maybe that will motivate me to block some more of my things ... but recently I've been wondering how many more cowls, scarves, shawlettes and shawls I really need. Maybe I should give away those I never wear or unravel them if I still want to use the yarn ...


Something else that got blocked was my beautiful bunny dragon scarf. Now I just need some backing and then some time to sew it together ... (and you can catch a glimpse of my terrible chaos here).


















Finally as an end to this incredibly long post a little teaser. After all the lovely lace and ruffles, this project will go into a much punkier direction:

oh september

Summer is over here in Austria, fall is beginning. The sky is a different blue, the air has a different quality, the tree leaves are already changing and the delicious fall foods and drinks are making their appearance: grape juice that is just starting to ferment (sweet and alcoholic) and certain flavors of icecream you don't get in summer like toffee and peanut. Although I will be missing the grapefruit icecream only available in summer, I definitely welcome the arrival of cooler weather.

Why no posts? Aw, the old up up down down game. I'm still looking for a job, which depresses me. And I broke the hook that closes the battery door on my camera by being stupid (although, who makes such an important hook out of plastic?) and need some superglue to fix it or at least attempt to fix it. It's still occasionally too hot to knit and it's definitely too hot to work on anything big, which is why I've been knitting baby clothes.

Yes, it is deliberately cutesy. Twee, even. Just wait until I add the flowers.

I only have a picture of Striped Gelato, though, the other ones need to wait for the superglue. Once again I was inspired by the random combination of colors in the sales bin at my favorite yarn shop. The yarn is Gedifra Mayra, which is soft and washable.

As for the construction, Striped Gelato is a top-down dress that should also work as a top later on. The straps are buttoned at the back, with lots of button holes to adjust for growth. The sides will be taken in to form pleats, but can be let out later. It's just waiting for a few more crochet flowers, but for that I'd have to clean up my couch to find the yarn leftovers ... so it will take a while. I also haven't quite decided whether I want to give it away or not.

The legwarmer trend is also continuing. The first two pairs of legwarmers I made from rather scratchy sock yarn (not that I mind), so I made this pair out of a ball of Lana Grossa Pashmina that was leading a rather sad neglected life on my couch (which, as can be seen above, is a treasure trove of yarn, paper and allllll kinds of things). I don't care how unflattering they are on my ankles, I just love how cute they are, all light blue and flower-patterned. Of course they're called Forgetmenot.

But I wanted to use up all of that nice light blue yarn. I don't like wearing light blue shirts anymore, because they make me look like such a good girl, but I love this shade of light blue. So, inspired by a crafty site and the prevalence of bows in fashion lately, I came up with an idea.

That would be the Forgetmeknot. I want to try a broader version in different yarn, too, but this had to suffice because I was running out of yarn and had to knit it a couple of times to get it right. So far, it's too warm to wear it, but I quite like it.

So I guess I better get some superglue next week ... there are so many things I've made that I'd like to show you, after all.

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.

what am i doing?

Recently I read another knitting blog that raised a lot of questions for me. What am I doing with my blog? What are my intentions with it? What am I showing and why am I showing it? How am I writing and why am I writing this way? What could I do differently? What does my blog say about me? When I started the blog, I intended to write "a knitting blog, although I guess I won't be able to keep out my opinions on movies, books, comics, music and other things out completely. A knitting blog that will hopefully not only cover the projects I'm working on, but also my thoughts on knitting, new patterns I've discovered, things that are going on in the knitting world and so on."

Ha! Considering the blog started to turn into THESIS BLOG in June 2010, it now seems a rather lofty goal. But up until then I had talked about my knitting, mostly, with a bit of music and anime thrown in for good change. And then I started with pictures of flowers. I worked so much in July 2010 that I had no time to knit and the computer broke and the thesis ... and I started illustrating my blog with pictures of Vienna and Scotland. Before going completely silent in September, I posted pictures from Switzerland, the Czech Republic and, once again, Vienna. Then I finally returned to blogging in February 2011, after I had finished the thesis and started posting pictures of the sky and the moon. And a few knitted items, too. Then, more pictures of flowers and of places I had been to - Hungary and Germany.

After reading the other knitblog, I'm now feeling uncomfortable with my pictures of flowers and earrings and the moon and the places I went to. I feel like I'm bragging. I feel like I'm being twee or posing as a hipster. I feel ... pretentious. The other knitblog had a lot of pictures of stuff - buttons, mugs, cloth, cutesy things. I thought of Bezzie and her views of another knitblog with beautiful (but extremely pretentious) pictures of knitting. I thought of all the other knitblogs I read - most of them feature either the knitter's life as it is or they feature lots of knitting. A very few - one or two - feature photography that I would call ... show-offy. A very few - one or maybe two - feature photographs of things other than knitting. I don't read the show-offy ones very often and I don't read the ones showing lots of cutesy stuff very often, either.

So why the heck did I post so many (pretentious, show-offy) pictures of flowers, the sky and the places I had been?  I mean, sheesh, for my travels, I actually have albums on facebook. Why here? I'm not even using the pictures to illustrate how certain colors of certain places INSPIRED me (caps because pretentious). My inspiration doesn't work that way. The rhododendrons in the last post made me think of underwear, not knitting. Maybe it's because I don't have a lot of confidence in my writing. The other blog was eloquent, if at times infuriating (because trite, wrong or pretentious, also some elements of the writing style got on my nerves very much). I feel like my posts aren't eloquent at all. I feel they're short and matter-of-fact and there's a lot of "-" and "...".

The knitblogs I like to read the most are eloquent and funny. And they make the daily life of their writers sound interesting. One of my favorite blogs doesn't even have pictures - or only very rarely. I don't trust my sense of humour to come across very well, it is weird, nerdy and obscure. My daily life isn't very interesting, either. I could rant away about the person playing saxophone in the other room (who is leaving in a few days, I'm glad to say) or about the lack of a shower curtain or the brothel or whatever it actually is (officially a swinger club/sauna ... yeah, right) in our house or the weird owner of the hotel in the house behind us who screams at people who put their trash in the trashcans because sometimes there are people who don't live in our house who deposit their trash in our trashcan, but while I love reading about such things on other blog, I, myself, don't feel like writing about them.

I could show you pictures of my room, of the flat I share with two other people, of the house and district I live in - but I'm shy about posting pictures of my own self and I wonder if my readers (I do have readers, the blog stats say so) actually would find it interesting to see where I live. I'm also afraid of looking pretentions in the way of "ooooo, look at me, I live in VIENNA in a house with JUGENDSTIL windows on the TOP FLOOR in one of the HIP DISTRICTS". But why did I post pictures of Vienna and other places I've visited, then? Nothing else to say or show, I guess. And the idea that a blog post without pictures is a bad blog post (I think I read that somewhere). Well, maybe I should take pictures of my chaotic room ...

Where is that line between pretentious and "oh look, I went here and saw this neat thing"? Where is the line between twee and "these are the buttons I'm going to use for this cardigan"? Showing you pictures of the two bowls that I got last week from a jumble sale - is that pretentious? After reading the other blog, I guess the answer is: yes. Showing you my grandmother's soup bowl that I use in place of a yarn bowl - that wouldn't be pretentious, I hope. It's not like it's a superduper expensive treasure or something. It's just a soup bowl.

But the other bowls aren't either. And they aren't even from the 19th century or anything. Googling has revealed that they must have been produced between 1939 and 1945 and inspection has revealed that I scratched the surface of one of the bowls during transport (bad porcelain, I must say). Showing you the earrings my mother gave me for my birthday - pretentious, I guess (really?). Is showing you the earrings that I recently bought from a place that sells cheap jewelry and repainted with nailpolish pretentious or a useful idea?

I do know that I feel jealous of bloggers who post pictures of the beautiful places they live in and the places they visit and the knick-knacks they own and the things they knit, always photographed against interesting backgrounds, in great clothes and neat shoes and headscarves and makeup. Actually, when I see the things they own, I want to own them, too. And I am jealous of their lives, too. Heck, I, too, would like somebody else to take pictures of me in my knitting in nice clothes and makeup in beautiful locations. I'd love to be married and have children, too. But I already have plenty of twee knick-knacks and buttons and live in a beautiful place and I have opportunities to go to beautiful places and knit beautiful things and I can take pictures of flowers and the moon and whatever else strikes my fancy. And marriage and children will come (hopefully). And why shouldn't I post these things on my blog? It's my blog, after all.

But I now feel just as pretentious as those bloggers. Displaying my privileged life and the stuff I own was not one of my intentions when I started this blog and now it's even less my intention. But it's so easy to hide behind beautiful pictures. It's easy to say "I went to Bonn and to the country and killed millions of dandelions" and not talk about the things that I should be doing (looking for a job, among other things). And damn, whining about the loss I feel after finishing my thesis is pretentious, too, which is why I haven't done it here.

I also find the pretentious blogs boring. There, I said it. Yes, buttons, yes, knitting, yes, whatever. I'm curious about your life, not your buttons. Well, I'm definitely a voyeur, heck, I see nothing wrong with what Jimmie Stewart did in Rear Window. But then, I am a historian, a professional voyeur of people's lives in the past. I'm immensely curious about the way people lived and continue to live (a convenient excuse), so I want to know how the knitbloggers live, too. Otherwise, show me your knitting and plenty of it.

But all this makes me wonder - what the heck should I write about on this blog then? Well, maybe I should write more about my knitting and take pictures of me in it, even if I'm not wearing makeup and the background is chaotic! I've also come to the conclusion that writing about knitting itself can be pretty pretentious, too, but still, I haven't done a post about "what knitting MEANS to me" yet. Maybe I should do that (don't worry, it won't be about CONNECTIONS or CONSUMERISM). Maybe I should just write what I want to write and show what I want to show and concentrate on my own life instead of looking at all the others and wondering why they seem to have it so much "other" than me. Of course other people lead different lives and write different blogs, duh.

Maybe it's time for a new job it totally is.

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.

looking for signs of spring in Hungary


Yes, it's been a while since I posted. The stomach virus killed my motivation and energy to do anything but sit and knit. I do have some pictures and a whole post on my 250th project prepared, but let me share something else with you today. Yesterday my mother and I drove to Hungary to have another look at the Eszterháza palace built by the Esterhazy family in Fertöd, a couple of kilometers over the Hungarian border. Here's a Wikipedia link (in English). 

The picture above shows the garden side, I didn't take a picture of the front, because the courtyard is currently being renovated and that doesn't look too nice. As you can see above and from the Wiki link, it used to be painted in what is called "Schönbrunn yellow", after the Schönbrunn palace in Vienna, which is also yellow. In an early attempt of corporate branding, Emperor Joseph II. ordered all buildings erected by the state and the Habsburg family to be painted in that color and so it became fashionable to paint everything in that yellow.


However, Schönbrunn used to be painted pink and grey and so did Estzerháza and while Schönbrunn will probably never be pink and grey again, Estzerháza is being renovated to show its initial coloring, which suits it much better. The beautiful gardens - also reminiscent of Schönbrunn, but less extensive and without the hills, fountains and follies - are also in need of renovation. There's a dell that probably used to be a fountain and you can tell where there were extensive flowerbeds and broad gravel paths to walk on, but those are all overgrown with grass.




Left over are the beautiful yew trees. Those attracted my attention the first time around when we went there a year and a half ago or so.

Back then, the grass was bleached to a pale green, the sun was wintry and faded and the black-green yew trees made such a stark contrast ... I still wish I had taken my camera that time. Ah well, I'll go again to capture it. As it is, I like the yew trees even now - I could probably stay a whole day and take pictures every hour to see how the light and shadows change.



But we actually went there to look for signs of spring and to take in the sun. I am extremely fond of spring flowers and while Vienna is showing definite signs, in the areas North and West of the city spring usually progresses far more slowly, so South we went.

And I was right, the sun was hot and the gardens of Eszterháza were teeming with violets and other wildflowers, bugs, ants and birds. There were so many violets that you could actually smell them, a sweet, delicious smell. Driving to and from Fertöd, we could see plum and peach trees in bloom already.

Apart from having fun with my new tripod, I had no fun at all messing with my camera settings. The blues in the violets and in these tiny star-like flowers which are native to this part of Hungary and are called Scilla buekkensis nearly drove me to madness, both in the food setting set on red (made the greens far too golden) and the macro setting (old problem of not catching the blue correctly).

I wonder why my camera can take pictures of the blue sky without any troubles, but these intense and unique blues and violets make it go haywire. Maybe it's the ultraviolet component. There ought to be a bee setting. Still, I think these came out rather well. Now back to knitting (and baseball anime).

stars and flowers

I'm at 39 pages and need to convince myself to get to 40 today. It's the last week before I start an internship at a library, which I'm looking forward to, but there are lots of things that I have to do this week, because next week I'll be on standard work time for the first time in a few years (2006 actually) and there are some things that can only be done in the mornings in Vienna, such as visits to the university offices to straighten out all the red tape hoops - or would that be red tape skipping ropes? - that I need to jump through to get my thesis on the official tracks. I hate red tape. Thank goodness my mental directions finally reached the history department and they put together something of a checklist, which looks fierce and dreary. So tomorrow I shall gather alllllllll my university papers and on Wednesday I'll go visit the hopefully nice people at the student service office to ask them what papers, signatures and whatnots I'll still need.

Gee, that was a lot of text! Would that my thesis would grow whilst I blog. But let's talk about flowers. I love flowers. I love taking pictures of flowers. And if my dinky little camera from 2004 was a little better at taking pictures of particularly vibrant flowers, I'd be overjoyed. It still takes pretty good pictures of roses, though. To wit:

That's my favorite rose in the whole garden. New Dawn. A climbing rose with a wonderful, not too overpowering smell and it blooms from May to September. Then there's Constance (Constance Spry), who after a few years of growing without any blossoms is now always full of them:

It's no wonder that roses would also inspire my knitting. I made up this Rose Mitten pattern on the go with a chart I found somewhere, the curlicues are part of a fairisle design. The yarn is Lana Grossa Mood Print, which is soft and squishy with a little silk to make it extra-nice. I finished these in September 2009 and haven't even woven in the ends yet ... tsk. Maybe in September 2010 so I can wear them.

Here's the palm ...

The thumbs are a bit of a weak point, design-wise, but overall, I'm pleased. Apart from the roses there are plenty of other flowers in that garden. Like peonies, which I also love very, very much. The light pink ones actually have a bit of a minty smell.

And an intriguing visitor ...

Here's the darker variety of peonies. Funnily, when I was searching for project pictures, I came across pictures of these same peonies and roses that I had taken in May 2008. I'm really glad these flowers decide to delight us again every spring. To be honest, I'd love to plant even more roses and peonies and all kinds of beautiful flowers, since they mostly take care of themselves, unlike vegetables.

Strangely, even though I love flowers so much, I don't actually have many knitted items that use an explicit flower design. I have a few with leaf lace, but flowers, not so much. This is one of the few items, the Plum Blossom mittens - frogged, sadly, because the yarn needs smaller needles. But I have the yarn still and will remake them at some point. I love the design of these so much and there are so many things you can do with the idea. The yarn is Lana Grossa Baby Alpaca, soft and lovely, but not very stretchy, hence the need for smaller needles.

In that garden, there's also a tree that my mother calls Japanese Lilac. I have no idea. It's from the botanical garden in Frankfurt, planted probably a hundred or so years ago, since it's rather large. This year the spring was so cold that it's blooming only now and the bees are all over it and making a lot of noise.

Funnily, the bees entirely avoided the following plant, I have no idea what it's called in English, we call it jasmine, but it isn't jasmine (I know, I have real jasmine here in Vienna).

I made a yellow spot on the kitty's forehead with that pollen. I like doing that, since all cats are yogis and he looks cute like that. Too bad I didn't take his picture. Overall, this blog really does lack cat pictures, I must say. Like the bees, I have avoided the following project. It's crocheted and actually very simple to make. I only made it because it looks like a flower. And I made it in those colors, because they were available, I have no excuse, really. Never wore it. Still love it. Just don't know what to do with it. The Chrysanthemum Tea Shawl by Doris Chan has been redesigned by her into a skirt as well, so maybe I'll try my hand at that at some point in a different color.

Now I'm definitely more in the mood to write. The star that I mentioned in the title is the evening star. I've been watching it every evening since the weather has cleared up. I know it's actually a planet, Venus to be correct, but it's still my favorite.