I get knocked down, but I get up again… remember that song? Right now it’s my knitting motto. Like Alexandre Vinokourov’s, my Tour de France suffered a nasty little wreck. I finished the back of Brigitte. I translated the instructions for the beginning of the right front, whence cometh the title — the first time I’ve ever encountered peloton in a context other than cycling, and I thought it was a great omen. I gathered up my little peloton of colors (more like a small breakaway, really) and cast on during the morning coverage of the race into Montpellier. It was early. I was bleary eyed and foggy brained.

It wasn’t until the evening that I took another look at my work and realized how garish “curry” is. I took it out in the natural light and my heart sank. Curry is not the right term. This is a pure hunter’s orange — Don’t Shoot, I’m Not a Deer orange. Cheney-Proof orange. And I was knitting a pair of flaming treadmarks in it right up the front of my sweater. It wasn’t bad with the “creole” red. It was god-awful with the “gomme” pink. Somehow they all seemed fine together when they were marinating in the stash. But twining around each other in the torsades, these colors were burning my retinas. What did I do? I kept knitting. This yarn came all the way from France. It isn’t available in North America. I need to put the hammer down and knit like a (wo)man possessed if I want to finish this sweater by the end of the Tour (my birthday, incidentally).

I finally came to my senses on the train into downtown for Knitting Night. I was making a serious piece of Ugly that I’d never want to wear and that might cause traffic accidents. It’s a terrible thing to do to a pretty sweater like Brigitte. I needed to ditch the orange and find something else. I don’t have enough creole to abandon the middle stripe and just have a pink edge. And this yarn has an unusual construction – cotton and wool plied together for an effect that looks cabled, but isn’t. I needed a whole new yarn.

In desperation, I scanned the shelves at Knit/Purl. Louisa Harding’s Nautical Cotton was my first thought, but the colors weren’t right and I thought it might be too heavy. O-wool Balance looked likely – it’s tweedier than I needed, but it had the right fiber content and there was a pretty decent pinky red. But the final choice is The Fibre Company’s Savannah, a blend of 50% merino, 20% organic cotton, 15% linen, and 15% soya fiber. The colorway is called “crimson,” but it isn’t. It’s a perfect transitional color between my red and my pink. And friends, it is awesome on the fingers. It’s so unbelievably soft that the rows are going to fly by because I can’t wait to get back to the middle section. A blanket of this stuff would break the bank, but it would be heavenly. I suspect it may be a little delicate, but I can’t stop petting it anyway.

But enough rhapsodizing. You want to see the Ugly, don’t you? Good thing Katrin had her camera on hand. (She even took a little video of the Ripping of the Ugly.)

Vino may have lost time on his rivals, but he isn’t done fighting. He’s never been my favorite rider — he’s seemed selfish and unwilling to help his teammates in Tours past — but I have to admire a guy who can ride hundreds of kilometers with perhaps as many as sixty stitches in his knees and elbows, getting rebandaged on the fly at the doctor’s car every hour or two, and then still have the audacity to try to get a jump on the sprinters and turn the whole race on its head. He’s my inspiration to get Brigitte back on track. Individual time trial this Saturday: I’ll be ready to put in my fastest effort. Here’s the good stuff: