Stash Appreciation: Shalimar Yarns Breathless

Sigh.  Yet again, I have fallen off the yarn wagon.  Not too hard, though - just this little skein of a fabulous merino/cashmere/silk blend.  I've had a hankering for a warm lavender fingering weight for a while, but it wasn't until I stopped by LYS a few weeks ago that I fell in love this color of Shalimar Breathless, called Wisteria.  I hemmed and hawed for a while, and then mentioned to Lumberjack that I was rather deeply coveting it, and he told me to stop being silly and go buy it.

(Just the one.  No, don't stop at the new Dream In Color lace-of-the-month club offering.  One skein, and tell your LYS owner with a completely straight face that you're on a stash diet, but you're saving that 20% discount for a sweater's worth of Madelinetosh, because it's not like you think about this stuff all the time, or anything.)

SIGH.

As an aside... when I think of wisteria, I think of Byōdō-in.  I took a Buddhist art history class while I was living in Japan, and we went on a field trip to visit a bunch of temples around the area.  Byōdō-in was the family villa of the Fujiwara clan, a powerful regent family of the Heian period whose representative flower was the wisteria.  They converted the villa into a temple in the 11th century, and the Phoenix Hall in the photo above is so iconic that it's on the ten-yen coin.  Though it was autumn when we visited and the wisteria arbors were just leaves and vines, I remember thinking that they would be beautiful in full bloom.

I've been thinking more and more about traveling lately.  One of the irons at the school fell on the floor and burnt some of the carpet, and weirdly, I smelled the market in Ubud and felt a pang.  Lumberjack and I are taking a trip to Oberlin at the end of the month, and I can't help but daydream about taking a driving trip down the California coast in the summer, or going to London to see the Victoria and Albert Museum, or going back to Kyoto to visit my host family and go to the Kyoto Costume Institute and maybe a hot springs or two...

I think I'll blame it on all the books I'm reading.

And in the meantime, pretty yarn will do.