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:

The little lady measures 15″ now. Yesterday morning, after we cheered cutie-pie Linus Gerdemann (how did he miss getting recruited to play an elf in the LOTR movies? I guess he was busy winning cycling titles for teenagers) to the finish line after his gutsy solo over the Col de la Colombiere, she took a little four-mile bicycle journey of her own in to work with me, where she was duly petted and admired. This was at 11:00 a.m.

At 5:45 p.m., I idly scratched behind my left ear. What do you suppose I found there?

But never mind. I’m at the armhole decreases, folks. This feels worth King of the Mountains points. At least I feel like I’m clinging to the tail of the peloton and not being dropped on the climbs, even if I’m not powering off the front of the chase group ala Iban Mayo. This brings me to an important point: one of the chief reasons I get up with the birds to watch the morning coverage is Phil and Paul’s commentary. Those guys are the best commentators in sports, bar none — besides their thorough understanding of the sport and knack for explaining the finer points, they are unrivaled for colorful descriptions. This morning, Paul, speaking of Mayo’s strong move, produced the following truly original metaphor, destined to take its place among the Phil & Paul classics*: “The confidence is bristling out of his crash helmet!”

You should all be watching this.

*”This climb is asphyxiating the peloton!” and “He’s reaching deep into his suitcase of courage now!” are a few of my other favorites. And, this morning’s entry in the Department of Idioms that Don’t Translate from English to American: “This crowd is absolutely going potty!”

No one likes to admit to psychological problems. But this morning I found a cable needle behind my ear while I was in the shower. And it wasn’t that I hopped in, realized I’d forgotten to de-needle, and quickly rectified the situation, which is the way it goes with my watch. I was shampooing obliviously away, and then suddenly there it was on the tiles, wet and soapy and about to make a dash for the drain.

I’ve done about three inches of Brigitte, and I need to find a way to step up the pace. At this rate, I’ll only make it to the armhole shaping on the back by the end of the Tour, and that’s frankly not good enough. I need to get monogamous with this little gal, and I need to take her with me everywhere, not just to my butterfly chair between the hours of 5:30 and 8:30 a.m. Good thing the Tour footage is on again tonight, and Mr. Garter is going solo to the Transformers movie. (There may be more, much more, than meets the eye, but it won’t be meeting mine.) Although I may need to figure out how to drag the television across the room and into the bathroom doorway so I can watch and knit from the comfort of a cold bath, like last year. It’s over 100 degrees — ugsome weather, if you ask me. At least my wooden cable needles float.

July has brought my favorite annual sporting event, the Tour de France. What better way to celebrate than to join Debby & Meg’s 2007 Tour de France KAL? I dithered over my project (anything, so long as there’s a French connection and a challenge involved) until the eleventh hour, using yesterday’s Prologue time trial to finish a sock. But as the peloton ground down a breakaway between London and Canterbury this morning and Robbie McEwen pulled out his most unbelievable win ever, I knit up a swatch.

My entry is an interesting cross-front cabled open pullover from Bergere de France. I grabbed the free PDF last summer and Veronique picked up the Bergereine wool/cotton yarn for me when she went home to Strasbourg. The pattern doesn’t seem to be available on B de F’s site any longer, but I’m happy to share the PDF and my English translation (still in progress) if you’re interested, since it was free from the company. If you read French, check out the B de F site – they have a lot of innovative designs.

Since B de F isn’t any more inspired in the department of pattern names than Vogue or Rebecca, I’m calling this sweater Brigitte for the fiery colorway. Since Veronique couldn’t find enough stock of these soft sagey greens, she went with my other choice: creole, curry, and gomme – spicy red, orange, and pink. Here are some details of the intriguing construction:

Here’s my swatch in creole:

Don’t mind the messy yarnovers – I was experimenting with the look. I think I’m going to go ahead and twist them for a smaller hole as the pattern suggests. It’s a subtler effect (and this sweater already has a lot going on) and it should help keep the pieces to gauge. I’m knitting the smallest size, taille 1/2, and I think it’s still going to be plenty big.

Finishing this sweater during the three weeks of the Tour may be a real moonshot – the pattern needs concentration and the yarn is very splitty (but a nice hand once it’s knit up – crisp and warm at once, somehow). I have enough of the pattern translated to get to the armhole shaping, anyway. Then I hit this:

Emmanchures: A 38 cm (114 rows) de haut. tot. rab. de ch. cote ts les 2 rgs: ??? This is something about decreases for the armholes, I assume. Aidez moi, mes amis!

Happy thanks to Debby and Meg for lighting a fire under me to get this one started, anyway. Tomorrow it’s bonjour, Belgique at 5:30 a.m. – time to cast on!