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 ...

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.

project 250

Before I flit off to Styria for a few days, let me tell you a little about my 250th project and let's ignore the trip to Bonn and the knitting I did there and the yarn I bought today until next week.


250 is supposed to be the first garment knit by and for myself that I can wear without thinking: "But I could have done this much better and this doesn't fit well and this isn't good and this and that is wrong". I picked a pattern that I have been wanting and waiting to knit since 2008. It's called Stormsvale (not a Ravelry link) and attracted me instantly with its pretty, understated herringbone stitch and attractive fairisle bands. Yes ... I can wait years until I start a pattern. Capricorns are patient like that.


However, I decided to go in a completely different direction with the construction. The yarn that I'm using is vintage yarn that was given to me by my father quite some time ago. It's probably between 35 and 40 years old or maybe older. I only have 10 balls of dark blue, a bit of grey, a bit of green and a bit of white - and the green is much moth-eaten. After some deliberation, I replaced the green and the white yarn with purple and a variegated turquoise-grey-brown yarn to make the fairisle band stand out more.

So making the most of my yarn gave me the idea of knitting this cardigan in a new way. Instead of starting at the bottom, I used a provisional cast-on and knit the color band that should sit just below the bust first - and I knit it with a steek, because that's easier.



Then I switched to smaller needles and used the instructions from the pattern for what would happen after the fairisle band, i.e., bust shaping, armhole shaping, back and shoulder shaping and so on. The shoulders were knit using shortrow shaping, so I could do a three-needle bind-off (so worth it!).

After that, I knit the two sleeves. They were also started from a provisional cast-off and with the color band. Instead of putting the band at the wrist I moved it up to the upper arm and decided that short sleeves were the way to go. My first try at an edging was a reverse stockinette edging that would curl inwards and give it a sort of i-cord bind-off look without the actual i-cord (I hate i-cord), but now I'm afraid that actual i-cord is called for to make it look good. Man, do I ever hate i-cord. And this jacket will need a lot of i-cord bind-off.


The next step in the plan was to pick up the stitches from the provisional cast-on of the main fairisle band and just knit down from there for the "skirt", increasing steadily to give the whole cardigan a sort of Jane Austen vibe. I started doing that and after a while, I felt the need to see how the whole jacket would look. So I used some small hair clasps to hold the pieces together and put in one sleeve.

And of course a problem immediately revealed itself. There is a lot of extra fabric under my arms that should not be there. It looks weird when I lift my arm and there are weird welts and bulk when my arm is down.

What was to blame? As per the instructions,
I increased stitches at both sides under the arms and that is where the extra fabric came from, since my gauge is a bit bigger than the pattern specified. The only solution to this is ripping out the whole top (curses and swearwords) and not increasing that many stitches. Or maybe still increasing the stitches, but making the armhole smaller.

Of course, if I do this, the question is whether the sleeves will still fit. Maybe I'll have to reknit the sleeves, too. I do have to reknit one, anyway, since I knit it far too loosely. Reknitting the whole top really doesn't thrill me at all very much, but since I am determined to make this jacket fit and look good, I'll do it.

It will be a good chance to fix the neckline, too. I went with the original neck instructions, intending to maybe do some ribbing instead of the fairisle stand-up collar, but that just looks too uptight. So, a far lower neckline is required and it will probably also be finished with the all-powerful i-cord bind-off (grumble). Then more i-cord for the skirt bind-off. Then sewing the steek! And then the endless button bands! Two of those! To say nothing of sewing the button loops and sewing on the buttons!

Why did I start knitting this again?

Well, look at that last picture. It will be a seriously nice jacket once it's done, so I'll put in the effort to make sure it will turn out that way. My new lace shawl will just have to wait ... and maybe I should block all the lace shawls I have knit up to now before I start a new one. Or not.

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).