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.

In any case, the features I was after were: pink/white, 5 petals, double bumps on the end of the petal like in the picture on the bag. For a flower, the flower knot was an easy choice. I went with pentagonal (for the 5 petals) with an overlap of 3 to ensure that the centre was nice and tight. For the double bumps, I was thinking of maybe strategically placed double coin knots, but tried the triangular flowers first. I think they work well for the double bumps. The silver cord, I was originally going to sideline through the entire knot, which would also have suggested stamens but decided to just hook them into the centre instead. This ended up being more fussy and less successful than I would have liked, especially with the extra overlapping in the centre. I was also going to use a translucent/pearlescent cord instead of the silver, but silver is what I had in the bag, when it was all going together…

Overall, I think it turned out ok, although it could probably have used another pass (plus a fresh redo once the design was worked out. 8)<p>

What do you think? Constructive suggestions for next year?