When my sister and I were in our early teens we made a pact of sorts that in giving each other Christmas presents we would always try to choose a gift that included something new and crafty to do; we lived in a fairly remote part of Devon, and if it was a stormy day and you'd already polished off your library books and finished your new Christmas books it could be a life-saver - seriously I once bought every variety of cross-stitch magazine one winter just for the cover kits because everywhere except for the newsagents was shut.
Over the years we both tried the real origami, with varying degrees of success - Zee is so much better at it than me, mine always look like the crumpled up contents of a school bin than a crane or a butterfly or whatever. The only thing I really mastered was a paper boat - and Dad taught me how to do that so I'm not convinced of its genuine Japanese credentials.
But in this last week I'm wondering whether in fact I just started with the wrong base materials. According to the powers that be Wikipedia, the word origami comes from ori meaning "folding", and kami meaning "paper". If the real origami is all about sculpting something beautiful out of paper without cutting it or using any sort of glue then I've got a new word:
Orikeito
Entirely made up by me combining ori for folding and keito which should mean yarn (more Google I'm afraid given that my chief words of Japanese are Noro and Kureyon), And I hereby declare Orikeito to be the new word for any knitted item that is comprised entirely of knitting; not a seam, not a kitchener stitch in sight.
Most shawls would be Orikeito by definition but I'm treating them a bit in the same way as my paper boats and that leaves me with just one real example:
which is of course the sheer whizztrickery that is Judy's Grandmother's Baby Jacket from Greetings from Knit Cafe.
I really can't rate this pattern highly enough in terms of fun for the knitter that leaves you with a completed jacket with only 6 ends to weave in and not a seam in sight. Hopefully J, whose August baby may get to wear it if we have our traditional English summer, will like it as much as I do.
And because there's nothing that an August baby needs more than matching double-thickness woolen baby shoes ...!
These aren't Orikeito by my own definition (far too many seams) but I almost feel that they should be because they're another classic example of a clever construction - squares that turn into shoes!
The yarn is Sublime Baby Cashmere Merino Silk DK in SeeSaw - I seem to be knitting gender neutral in turquoise this year. I know it's gender neutral because I asked H whether it was looking a little too girly (correctly answered 'no') and the conductor on the train to work, assuming that it was for Baby Bear, said 'I see you're not having a girl with that colour'.
The other thing I can now tell you about this yarn other than its softness and general yumminess is that if you were perhaps to pop a completed baby jacket in a little bowl of lukewarm water and lavender Eucalan to soak before blocking and you then perhaps forgot about it (not that any of us would of course), and you didn't remember until the next morning (with an unladylike expression that you very much hope that your unborn child was asleep for), neither the yarn nor the baby jacket will some to any harm.
And finally, for Caroline, who enquired about the daisies:
You can always girlify things with crochet flowers if you feel the need. I didn't have this problem because all we'd bought were some plain babygros and a few vests, I expected to be swamped with gift clothes and that's exactly what happened. We didn't have a name either which ticked the hospital staff off no end but you can't rush these things.
ReplyDeleteI love it. I can still make origami water bombs with great success. When you have two young boys and a very hot summer throwing water bombs at each other is a great way to cool off.
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