Never mind that it’s 59 degrees F and raining. The calendar says it’s July (and my husband has been wearing shorts out of sheer stubbornness), and if you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you know that means Tour de France fever! Yes, I’ve once again got a hand in organizing the international knitalong (we’re over on Ravelry and we’re happy to welcome latecomers for a few more days if you’d like to join us). My friends and relations find this somewhat hilarious and/or bemusing, I think. Maybe it’s the fact that there are nearly eighty other fruit bats out there from Australia to Holland who love to watch cycling and knit at the same time and then talk about it on the internet. In years past I’ve taken on a really big challenge for the 21 days of the Tour, most recently designing and knitting Footlights and Daisy Daisy.

This year’s going to be a bit different. With a baby due in five and a half weeks, there are some things that need to be accomplished. I’ll try to put some nearly finished projects to bed so they won’t be abandoned for months once I’ve got my hands full of squalling newborn. And this poor baby has very few handknits made by its own mother (happily several aunties-to-be have been filling the void — those gifts deserve their own post!), so I’ll try to remedy that, beginning with Carina Spencer’s Small Things Romper, to which I’ll be adding a special touch:

I shall call it the Lanterne Rouge romper. (The Lanterne Rouge is the guy who finishes dead last in the Tour. Now do you get it?) Cute snailie isn’t mine; I borrowed his chart from Adrian Bizilia’s wonderful Norwegian Snail Mittens (in Clara Parkes’s The Knitter’s Book of Yarn) and modified it just a touch since it doesn’t need to fit on a mitten. In addition to nodding to the Tour, this snail is a sort of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” tribute to the soggy summer we’re having. His less adorable and far more voracious brethren have left my hostas in tatters.

Tomorrow morning I get to cast on! Since the powers that organize world sports have seen fit to schedule the Tour prologue at the same time as the Argentina-Germany soccer match, there may be a bit of squabbling over the remote, and I’ll probably have to go back and watch both events in full later in the day. Good thing the weather outside isn’t tempting.

Thanks mostly to the generosity of others, our child is beginning to acquire a few garments, a large number of receiving blankets, sheets, diapers, and other necessities. (Today we added a jogging stroller to this list, handed down in mint condition from a lovely family at school!) This past weekend I took advantage of the only sunny day in three weeks to wash Minnow’s little wardrobe:

Awwww, wee baby things hanging on our wash line for the first time ever! I had to take a picture. I also resolved that Minnow should have more clothing made by Mama to hang on that line. Which leads me to these:

These are some extremely venerable khaki shorts belonging to Mr. G. If he hasn’t actually had them for all ten years of our relationship, it’s pretty close. They have permanent grass stains and paint splatters. As you can see, it was time for him to stop wearing them (that’s the crotch seam in the last photo), but it made me sad to see them in the trash bin. Surely there’s some good fabric remaining there, I thought. There are some thin spots, but they’re mostly sound and pleasingly soft from all those years of wear. I pulled them out of the bin and spread them on my sewing table. I took out the pattern for the Oliver + S Sandbox Pants I’d purchased and compared the smaller sizes to the ancient shorts. Looks like Minnow may be able to have a pair of play pants just like Daddy’s.

So tonight I spent a couple of hours with the seam ripper, my pink fabric pencil, scissors, and jazz piano on the radio. Stay tuned. I have an absurdly busy weekend ahead, but I have hopes of squeezing in a little sewing.

If you’ve followed the procession of handknits at Blue Garter over the years, you may have realized there hasn’t ever been much pink in the palette. I don’t avoid it the way I did in my tomboy phase (which was, um, a little more protracted than most girls’), but it’s still not something I usually choose for myself. So when Marika called to tell me my niece was going to be, well, a niece and said, “I hope you have some pink yarn!”… I had to go out and buy some pink yarn. Here’s the result:

Click for bigness. I think the buttons are pretty cute.

This is Sweet Peasy, knit in a finer yarn (Spud & Chloe Fine, in fact) on a #3 needle following the directions for the 3/4 size. I estimate it’ll fit a 6-9-month old, and maybe for longer than that if the little niece is petite like her mother. It’s a sort of apple blossom pink, which even I can appreciate.

It continues to be all baby sweaters all the time ’round these parts, but I’ve got vacation coming up in another week and so I hope to have some finished adult knits to share with you very soon!

Knitting at faculty meeting is one of the pleasures of my work week. I am blessed with extraordinary colleagues, men and women of intellect, empathy, and humor; it’s always a treat to converse with them. Perhaps it is not coincidental that a surprisingly large percentage of them are also knitters. When we gather on Wednesday afternoons we’re a group of about 30, and there are regularly four or five laps containing balls of wool and flashing needles. At least as many more more pairs of hands hold the knowledge but prefer other settings.

Anyway, about a month ago, in the midst of a discussion about effective teacher training practices or plans for a colloquium on mentorship and creativity, I noticed Jen was working on a little brioche sweater, infant size. It reminded me of having seen tantalizing bits of Nancy Marchant’s new brioche book on the internet and being quite taken with the two-color brioche examples (this jacket is a particularly natty piece of design, don’t you think?). So when Jen mentioned on Friday that she was casting on a third little brioche sweater to brush up the pattern for publication, I told her of my desire to try it in two yarns. We met up at Twisted that evening, she refreshed my memory of the Channel Islands cast-on, we guessed at some different math for my Socks That Rock Lightweight versus her Heavyweight, and with the help of Nancy’s book I started the experiment.

Now I can’t stop, because it is just so stinking PRETTY!

I’m thinking of this as the boy side — that’s Blue Moon’s “Blue Brick Wall” colorway you’re seeing on the ribs. And when you flip it over, you get the girl side (an STR “Rare Gem”):

Just below the needle you can see where I’ve done the first round of yoke increases… they’re reversible, too. The illustrations in Nancy’s book are so clear it was no problem to learn how to do them waiting for my turn in the shower this morning, and you know how I love acquiring new knitting skills.

Speaking of this morning, let’s have a moment of appreciation for my husband. I woke up thinking it would be an awfully good idea if we stopped by Grand Central Bakery on the way to choir, because rhubarb is finally in season and the Grand Central Rhubarb Handpie is one of my favorite treats on the planet. Mr. G loves the idea of my craving anything due to pregnancy (in truth, I get the rhubarb handpie jones just as strongly when not gravid), so he was in favor of the plan. And when we got to the bakery, there they were — five or six beautiful rhubarb pastries on the tray behind the glass. I drooled in their general direction as we waited in line, and then it was our turn to order. AND THE HANDPIES WERE SOLD OUT. Because the people at the next register had just bought ALL OF THEM. Words cannot express how crestfallen I was. I flailed about in distress and finally agreed to settle for a strawberry-rhubarb tart, which is half the size and really not the same thing at all (although undeniably tasty in its own right). But while I was still looking daggers at the handpie looters across the cafe, my husband already had his phone out and was calculating that we had just enough time before choir to go by the other Grand Central location in Northwest and confirming that they still had a few handpies left and would hold one for me. I told him that I really was just about capable of being a big girl about the disappointment (or would be in another few minutes), but the man would stop at nothing to satisfy my needs. So I got my rhubarb and we even made it to choir on time. It was a good morning.