I'm back from my holiday in Paris, and it was an incredible time. I went with my boyfriend and we did all the major tourist things, the monuments, the museums, and whatnot.
Since I only had four days, and I was with a decidedly non-fibery man (despite his having made me two scarves in the past), I didn't get to do too much crafty stuff. For one thing, I didn't visit any Paris yarn shops. There were several that I considered visiting, including La Droguerie, which has its own line of yarn and patterns, and L'OisiveThe, a tea room which also sells hand-dyed yarn imported from the States. But the truth was there simply wasn't enough time for them, and most of the yarn in Paris was stuff I could buy either locally here in the UK, or online. Maybe next time I'll do a Paris yarn crawl, who knows.
However, I did do some shopping while in gay Paree, and one of my quests was for Japanese knitting books. I found two Japanese bookshops in Paris: BookOff, which specializes in used books, CDs, and DVDs, and Junku. Both are fairly close to each other - BookOff is just a few streets off the Place de Opera, and Junku is on the Rue des Pyramides.
Junku didn't have a lot of knitting books (their sewing book selection was huge, but there were only about a dozen books in the knitting/crochet section), but BookOff had a great selection. I was especially in search of those famed Japanese stitch dictionaries, which I couldn't find, but I did pick up a great little book chock-filled with interesting patterns.
![ミセスのセーター&ベスト](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5106/5646262337_7e62f17893.jpg)
(if anyone can read Japanese and tell me the title, let me know! It's apparently book 6 of the 'Let's Knit series'.)
![ミセスのセーター&ベスト](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5025/5646263781_8a88162838.jpg)
The patterns in here are beautiful, with some totally new stitch patterns to me, and some interesting constructions. There are both knitting and crochet.
![ミセスのセーター&ベスト](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5303/5646828526_4239c463a3.jpg)
The best thing about Japanese knitting patterns? Totally charted, with detailed schematics. So you can knit these with no knowledge of Japanese.
![ミセスのセーター&ベスト](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5027/5646829778_9e435b7378.jpg)
~Joyuna
The book patterns and pictures look lovely.
ReplyDeleteI have a Japanese crochet jewelry book. I can't read not even one word of what it is saying, but the pictures and the jewelry are so beautiful I just can't throw it away.