keitodama

Guess what came in the mail today! Well, by FedEx actually but that was only because there was no other mailing option. Yes, I got tired of trying to decipher the diagrams that I had found on flickr and was too scared of the Russian bittorrent to download it (would that even work? would your computer just get very sick?) so I navigated through amazon Japan and lo and behold, Keitodama 137 has arrived on my doorstep.

There are fifty-odd pattern in here, knit and crochet and a mix thereof. It's really interesting to see the range of garments and shapes that are offered in a foreign seasonal publication (this is a Spring issue so I'm assuming that it comes out quarterly). Quite a few dresses, quite a lot of crochet (some of it a bit scary), knit and crochet together in the same garment, bag and choker accessories and a completely different aesthetic to an equivalent (maybe?) Western publication like a Rowan magazine (and little of the styling finesse which I do think counts for a whole lot of the appeal of Rowan magazines). There are a couple of things in here that I like, although the sizing is way off for me and I'm not sure that I could follow the knitting diagrams as well as I could the crochet ones.


















The visual crochet instructions are very dense. My next task today will be to make some enlarged copies of the instructions and erase any extraneous information so that the diagrams are not so crowded. Then, to choose a yarn ...