Would you believe me if I told you knitters’ heaven is at a Holiday Inn in Marshfield, Wisconsin? I don’t know about eternity, but I could spend an awfully long, happy time amid the heaps of beautiful sweaters, hats, mittens, etc. knit by Elizabeth Zimmermann, under the kind and gracious tutelage of Meg, Joyce, and Amy, with scores of inspiring knitterly comrades. We stuffed our brains with new techniques and sage advice, we drank good beer at the pub across the street, we laughed and chattered for hours and applauded each other’s successes. And we knit like fiends all day long and into the night. Jen and I even woke up early to knit and watch the Tour from our beds.

All too soon the weekend was over and I was boarding a plane to return home. As I did so, I came crashing back to earth most unpleasantly: I discovered that I am going to run out of wool for my yellow cardigan. I thought 850 yards was plenty, but I was wrong. Of course, when I misjudge things like this, I pay heavily. The yarn is from Uruguay; it’s been in the stash for three years; they’re not making the same color any longer. So yesterday saw me in a frantic scramble around town to find a yellow laceweight that was similar enough to substitute. No dice. I bought a skein of Socks That Rock mediumweight in 24 Karat with the insane idea that I might be able to unravel it and use a single ply. This is madness, of course, and will probably lead to ruination (the yarn’s) and despair (mine). I also went online and ordered a skein of Lanas Puras Melosa laceweight in Sunset, which looks like a very similar yarn, but seems to have more brown than my yarn. If it’s really brown, I’m tempted to go all Kay Gardiner and take the bleach to it. (Of course I’ll try this on a single strand before I dip half a skein in. I’m not that far gone. UPDATE: DON’T BLEACH WOOL. It dissolves. Luckily Véronique pointed me to a scientific article about this; I didn’t find out the hard way.) Either way, I’m like poor John-Lee Augustyn, having face-planted off the mountainside and lost my bicycle down the scree, now forced to wait by the road for the team car to bring up a new machine. So I thought I’d keep the French spirit of my knitting alive and finish this:

This is something I’ve been plotting for a long while. My grandmother was fond of the work of a French surrealist named Jean Lurçat, who worked in both textiles and ceramics. I don’t know much about him, but I’ve seen a tapestry of his in the Vatican Museums, and my grandmother (a needlepoint artist herself) had purchased the most wonderful rooster tapestry on one of her visits to her brother and family in France. My cousin has it now. We also have a small collection of black-on-yellow ceramic tiles by Lurçat, the best of which I let my brother take on the condition that he send me a picture of it so I could incorporate it into a knitting design:

I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull this off until I saw Joyce and Meg’s book on Armenian Knitting last fall. Aha! You carry both colors throughout the entire hat, intending the trapped stitches to show through, and then you just bring the contrast color to the fore to make your design! Genius!

See the little flecks of yellow showing through the black? Doesn’t it look tweedy? You know how I feel about tweed.

Inside, it looks like this:

Loose floats all over, but you can just make out the rooster in reverse where I carried the yellow as the main color and trapped the black. These yarns, by the by, are both Socks That Rock lightweight. Korppi and Pondscum. The best part is that when I picked them out at Madrona last winter and explained what I was going to do with them, Tina knew who Lurçat was and was enthusiastic about the project.

So, one Camp project down. I’ve got another to show as soon as I weave in the ends, and a third to work on during the Tour over the next day or two while I wait for my yellow laceweight to come. Hurry, little skeinlet! I need to get back in the race!