A pentagonal stellar knot tied in red, white and blue in a tribute to the flag colours and stars. Since I wanted the colours to remain in the same order as they went around the knot, the ears could not nest as is usually desirable in a ribbon style multi-strand knot. Instead the colours cross as shown below. Knowing this would happen, I had planned to cut the ears when I started thinking of the design. Once cut, it was both less and more than I expected as the cut ends were more chaotic than I was expecting, although down near the body of the knot the doubled colour alignment from the front and back layers was... well, I'm still trying to decide how much I like or dislike it. 8)

A maple leaf for Canada Day. What can I say, maybe next year I'll knot a beaver or a moose. 8)

The Cherry Blossom Festival is a strange event with no fixed date. It's not even like a solstice or something related to the lunar calendar, it's when the cherry blossoms decide to fall on a given year. Vancouver's Cherry Blossom Festival is officially designated as March 28 - April 24, at least this year (2009), but on my street, the flowers hadn't fallen even by the last day of April. That said, it's entirely possible that the trees I had my eye on weren't cherry trees at all. My grasp of things botanical is fairly weak as befits the owner of a black thumb of death.

So, I had this image in my mind of an abstract-ish rabbit with a nice triangular face and long ears. So I tied a triangular good luck knot with inset ears.

Let me start with a story. Almost 50 years ago when my mother first arrived in Canada, she was shopping at the grocery store when she was approached by a shop employee. He said that she had been randomly selected to win a year's worth of groceries if she would answer a simple skill testing question: when is St. Patrick's day? Well, mom being pretty fresh "off the boat" had no clue and therefore didn't win the prize. I'd have thought the event would have burned the date into her brain (she certainly tells the story regularly) but when I asked her about it the other day, she still had no clues when St. Patrick's day was. Oh well.

Here's the long awaited Valentine's day post. 8) 8) I'm told that I should get a move on for Saint Patrick's day... 8)