I’ve found that it’s particularly easy to soften your husband towards the idea of cafes au lait, brioches, and canelets if he’s spent the early hours of the morning helping you clean the house prior to the arrival of your entire family. He hardly even blinked when I suggested that the camera might accompany us for some retakes of Brigitte. So off we all went to St. Honore, which was hopping. Finally there was a hiccup in the stream of salivating customers, so we took these:

Brigitte, née Bergere de France Pull Ouvert, for the Tour de France Knit-along

Yarn: Bergereine, 50% wool, 50% cotton, 9+ skeins créole and 2 skeins gomme; The Fiber Co. Savannah, merino, cotton, and other natural goodies, 1 skein crimson

Needles: US #4 and #6

8-29 July 2007. . . a new land-speed record for sweater knitting by yours truly.

Modifications: Translated from the French, front cross reverse engineered from the (excellent) pattern photos after the written directions went up in smoke, back shaping altered to accommodate a full collar, new yarn substituted for the originally intended “curry” to make the sweater more wearable outside hunting season.

Impressions: I’m glad I gave this intriguing pattern a shot. It wore me out and my hands were sore for a week after I finished because I logged so many hours trying to make my end-of-Tour deadline. This sweater was a lot of work and probably would have taken me months to complete without the knitalong, but it seems to be pretty wearable. The bulk of the fabric and the torque of the zig-zag pattern made for rather hefty shoulders; I almost feel as if I ought to pad them out, 1940’s style. If I sort of tug and pat them into place, they’re not too bad. As much as the torsades (cables) were a pain with the interlocking yarns, I love the way they look.

I also love the effect of the twisted rib — too bad it’s such tortuous knitting for us throwers. Mr. G’s Fishtrap Aran was also essentially a whole mess of twisted rib. It seems I’m drawn to those snug, natty stitch columns, no matter how long it takes me to work them.

Speaking of tortuous knitting, next time I’ll reveal the big wedding stole plans. I think you’ll be impressed. Heck, I’ll be awfully impressed with myself if I can pull this one off by next May.

Thanks to the most intensive four days of knitting I’ve ever logged, Brigitte was all done at 9:17 last night. That makes Mamie the winner – narrowly – over Elaine: congrats, Mamie, and thanks to everyone for playing along. I’m picking out some choice items to pop in the mail tomorrow morning. These little contests are fun, so I’ll have to dream up another before too long!

But without further ado, Brigitte:

I thought she’d feel most at home if she debuted in as French a setting as possible, and I always like the chance to consume some authentic pastries. So Mr. Garter and I whiled away an hour or two at St. Honore, boulangerie-patisserie extraordinaire. (I promise that chausson aux pommes was not as big as my head – it just looks that way in the photograph.) I made Monsieur mon mari take je ne sais pas combien des photos and then – quel horreur – some sort of “card error” ate all but two of them! This is the better of the survivors. Zut alors. I’m praying it was a random glitch, and not some kind of flash card death spasm. Won’t Mr. G be thrilled when he learns we need to do a reshoot? I’ll dangle a quiche for bait. Camera gods willing, I’ll have some better pictures in a day or two, and we’ll do the summary judgment then. (Who are the camera gods, incidentally? There’s sure to be a patron saint of photographers, at least… ah, it’s St. Veronica. I wonder if she takes burnt offerings?)
In the interval, a distraction:

Meet Signy. She’s my new Husqvarna Viking Emerald, a birthday gift from myself and from my grandmother. She and I are going to have all kinds of fun together, just as soon as I acquire a wee extension cord so I can reach her accelerator without stretching my leg halfway across the Fibordello.

And what to knit next? I’ve been so monogamous with Brigitte these three weeks that I hardly remember what else I was working on. (This is always dangerous: the siren song of new projects grows louder and more seductive in the wake of a major accomplishment, I find.) Back to the Frost Flowers, I guess. Interesting coincidence that its front construction produces a pullover that looks like a cardigan, much like Brigitte. And several friends are spawning offspring in the next month or two, so we all know that means baby sweaters. I recently stashed a little Dream in Color Smooshy Sock Yarn in the luscious In Vino Veritas (don’t think I’m missing the irony there, TdF KALfolk) colorway that I think will make a darling EZ February sweater for the coming girlbaby. Simple stockinet and quick knits for little people should be just the ticket to relax and soothe my crampy hands after the epic strain of finishing Brigitte.

This was supposed to be a week dedicated to knitting, pattern drafting and polishing, reading, writing, gardening, watching the Tour de France — plus a little light housekeeping and general relaxation. A haircut. A trip to the DMV to procure an Oregon license, since my old one expires on Sunday. (This means studying the local rules, since I have to sit for the knowledge test again. If the practice test is an accurate indicator, I’m up a creek. Is knowing how much the fine is for a DUI really going to make me more competent behind the wheel?)

In the end, hardly anything has gotten done, apart from the avid Tour watching (Vino, how could you be so stupid? Rasmussen, how am I supposed to believe you aren’t doping when you keep riding away from your rivals like there are afterburners concealed in your lycra shorts?) and the wrestling with Brigitte. Appropriately on the biggest mountain stage, I cracked. I hit the portion of the pattern where the fronts cross, and it all went to pieces. The pattern makes no sense in French or English — it can hardly have been written by the same person who knit the sample. I had to go freestyle, but not without a lot of cursing and fiddly tinking and adjusting errors six rows down and breaking yarn only to rejoin it in the same place on the next row. Were I to wear this sweater inside out, I’d have tassles enough for a Vegas showgirl.

Four stages to go, and I have yet to finish the front or begin the sleeves. And then there’s the seaming, and the weaving in of all those beastly unnecessary ends. It’s like a broken derailleur on an HC climb, and the pack is riding away up the slope while I wait for the team car. So now it’s all or nothing. I’m giving myself until midnight on Sunday to limp in as the lantern rouge, the rider with the slowest overall time. There’s not so much shame in being the lantern rouge as you might think, the way I figure it – lots of guys have to abandon entirely. What do you think, can I gut it out and finish Brigitte by the end of the 29th?

Just to make this more fun, let’s have a little game. Leave a comment and tell me what date and time you think I’ll clip off the last end – it can be after the 29th (and it might be!). The person with the closest guess will get a nice surprise out of my ever-burgeoning stash. You have until the end of the live coverage on Saturday to make your guesses – by then we’ll have had the long time trial and we’ll know who the yellow jersey is going to be in Paris. Okay, go! I’m off to count some more decreases and figure out how to work my special extended collar piece. Thanks for tuning in.

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: