…and then, Hot Damn! I wish I could knit like my great-granny! I’m hazarding a guess that’s who made these absurdly adorable tiny booties. They’re the greatest find thus far among the things shipped out from my grandmother’s house in Connecticut. They look too antique to have been made for my dad or his brother, so I’m going to guess they go back another generation. Some ancestress, anyway, had mad knitting skills, and I’ve been trying to puzzle out exactly how these booties were constructed so I can reverse-engineer a pattern. As far as I can tell, the garter feet were knit flat and seamed up, and then the ribbed section was picked up and worked in the round. There are little short rows on the heels and everything. And the gauge? Eleven stitches per inch, people. These were worked on much tinier needles than my trusty size 0’s, another factor that makes me think they predate the 1940s. Some woman lovingly patched a few holes, and they’ve been washed enough to have gently felted. I like to think of my father having worn them as a wee baby. Now I get to save them for my own offspring. Let’s have a little more gratuitous cuteness:

Yesterday I ended the longest knitting drought I’ve had since I began nearly two years ago. I hadn’t knit since the World Cup final, if you can believe it. Four whole days without knitting! That’s because my parents were here and we all rolled up our sleeves and plunged into home improvements with scarcely a break for food, let alone fiber. (I know we could argue they’re of equal importance, but food won out because I was already starting each day spinning during the Tour de France. Need I remind you that it begins at 5:30 a.m. out here in the west, on the sane days when they have the flat stages? We will not speak of the 3:30 start for tough mountain stages like yesterday’s. Not even I am that crazy.) We painted the basement, we built 80′ of shelving (yes, that’s feet, not inches), we sawed the boxspring in half so we could get it up the stairs at last, we unpacked and unpacked and unpacked some more. And guess what? The house is still full of boxes. And all the while, I was racing to meet freelance deadlines. So when I packed off the proofread galleys of The Society of Secret Superheroes yesterday afternoon, it was finally time to treat myself to this:

Dear neglected Viennese Shrug, thy yarn is like blackberry sorbet. Why have I not finished you yet? I’ve just joined the second sleeve for working in the round, so the knitting should move quickly from here. And I couldn’t resist showing you the view above my head as I lounged in the shady back garden. Anyone spurning pink and green as “so two years ago” ought to take a gander at my mimosa tree. Those were its flowers in the pictures of Pomatomus, outrageous blooms that remind me of punk rockers, fireworks, and sea anemones.

But now it’s back to work in the basement. I can hear Mr. Garter running the power tools, and sometimes he forgets to use the level. Plus there’s another segment of wall to paint “sunporch” yellow.

A good Bastille Day to the French folk out there!