The weaving shop is run by a grandson of the founder of Saori weaving. After lunch we went for a walk in Kichijoji because they wanted to show me a new weaving shop that is near Avril. Then today I went to Kichijoji to have lunch with two of my former graduate students, Chris Bondy and Eiko Saeki, who met and married in Hawaii and are now living in Kichijoji with their charming two-year old bilingual son Aiden. Naif Mela yarn for a Kestler shawl in reds, pinks, and grays.
#NORO KIBOU YARN SHADE 12 MOVIE#
I also bought a 1950s Japanese movie poster of a film based on some famous early postwar antiwar books, but that’s another story that doesn’t belong in this blog! Now that I’ve taken the beads out to photograph them, I think they are probably too heavy to use on the finer weight wool shawls I’ve been weaving recently, but I’ll find some use for them. It helps weight the ends of the shawl and adds a nice finishing touch, but requires that I take careful notes to make sure both ends are reasonably similar and that I have enough matching beads. They are too big for scarves, but I bought them thinking they might work for shawls, where I sometimes put in two or three rows of a fatter weft yarn and leave the tails hanging, and then attach beads to the tails. I sometimes put beads on scarves and shawls, and after picking around for a while I found eight of the same pattern beads, similar to Pandora beads but a much more reasonable 100 yen (a dollar) per bead. There weren’t many kimono but we both were entranced by two trays of beads with little picks for picking them up, sort of like eating escargot. This one was quite large and had lots of interesting things. The following Sunday we went in the opposite direction to a new (to us) flea market at Tomioka Hachiman Jingu in Monzen Nakacho. I’ve turned two on their sides so you can see the mottled pattern that has some lavender in it. Glass beads with large openings similar to Pandora beads.
So soon we were both knitting our neck pieces. I had to finish half a sock for my husband before I could start on the neck piece, but fortunately, the smaller needle that I use for the heel and sock bottom was the right size.
#NORO KIBOU YARN SHADE 12 PLUS#
A little negotiation produced a substitution so we were able to buy one kit plus another set of three balls of yarn in a different color combination. We each decided to buy the yarn for the little shawl, but they didn’t have the color we wanted in the kit. Yasuko was first buying it to knit summer socks, but then we saw the pattern by Bernd Kestler in a kit. We also discovered a really interesting knitting pattern for a sort of neckpiece-shawl that used three balls of an Italian variegated yarn called Mela Naif, which is 45% cotton, 42% wool and a little polyamide. I will add the other one to my stash, since I often weave with Leafy. I bought four of those and my friend can take her pick. They had a second blue Leafy, this one with some tan in it. We then moved on to the Okadaya yarn store in Shinjuku, which in the past has not been as good as Yuzawaya. That was the only thing I found of interest at Yuzawaya in Kichijoji. There was a new blue and green one, so I bought four skeins of that.
However, it turns out that Leafy changes color numbers every year, and this number was a couple of years old and sold out. I had an order to fill for a friend in Honolulu, who wanted four skeins of Leafy washi paper yarn in a variegated blue for which she had given me a color number. The top one is blues and greens, while the bot Two different blue Leafy washi paper yarns from two different yarn stores.