I’ll come clean right away: I’ve been sitting on pictures of an FO for twelve days. Das ist not gut. There’s no excuse, so I won’t try to make one. I give you Viennese Shrug:

Viennese Shrug, from Interweave Knits Summer 2005

6 skeins of Noro Cash Iroha in a tasty raspberry color

US #7 Addi Turbos

Modifications… oh, so very many. Although I have the Morehouse Merino this pattern demands in my stash, it’s earmarked for something else, and I really wanted to make a summery top layer out of this delicious Noro. Long-time readers may be shocked at my decision to knit not one but two shrugs, given my well established sentiments toward Garments Without Fronts. The first time I only had a week to knit something to wear to my sister-in-law’s wedding, and the yarn matched my shoes so nicely I couldn’t resist the One Skein Wonder. How can I defend myself this time? I think it was the lace that drew me in. I really enjoy lace knitting, but I don’t find I’m much of a shawl wearer and I’m sure not making any doilies. So I was intrigued by this unusual three-dimensional Viennese Lace pattern, and it was so easy to envision it in the Cash Iroha Mr. Garter gave me last birthday.

Realizing that vision was a little more tricky, since my gauge was wildly different from the pattern’s. I’ll spare you the details of my three failed attempts to achieve anything like the desired shape, lest your eyes glaze over. If you’re just dying to knit a Viennese Shrug in Noro Cash Iroha, you can email me and I’ll be more than happen to hand over my roadmap.

And the verdict? We’re done with shrugs, I swear. I did have a good time making this one despite the obstacles, and I do find that it’s wearable, although I can’t shake the feeling it makes my bosom look like the prow of an ocean liner. Plus the taunts of my friends echo my own deep-rooted antipathies. My friend Rosa teased me about having forgotten to knit the front. I lightheartedly told her I ran out of yarn (which is completely true: I had only a wee pile of ends left over). Let’s just all up and admit that the shrug was an ill-advised fashion foray from the get-go, and publish no more patterns for them. Especially none with tempting lace patterns, okay?

P.S. No, that’s not my garden. It’s the International Rose Test Garden.

P.P.S. No, I don’t speak a lick of German. Here’s my one phrase: der boden ist schmutzig (the floor is dirty). Not very useful in conversation, however true it might be. I certainly don’t know how to sing the praises of interesting Viennese traditional patterns, more’s the pity.

P.P.P.S. I’m a hopeless nerd. I looked up how to say “delinquent” in German. It’s straffaellig.

It’s hot. Too hot. Here’s what it’s been like:

5:00 p.m. Weave in ends of Viennese shrug while watching replay of Tour de France coverage. Note irony of completing wool blend sweater on hottest day of year. Wish for team car with 72 bottles of water to drink and pour over head a la Floyd Landis.

6:00 p.m. Hungry. No desire to produce any extra heat in kitchen by cooking anything. Crave Thai food.

6:15 p.m. Fortuitously discover excellent Thai restaurant is only ten blocks away from new house. Huzzah! Praise creation of internet. Ten blocks is just at the limit of feasible walking distance through atmosphere of soup outside.

6:30 p.m. Commence eating delicious Thai food in blessedly air-conditioned environment. The world is a brighter place, and not just because the restaurant is painted the orange of life preservers, tiger lilies, and high school gym lockers.

6:50 p.m. Awesome neighbors, it turns out, had the same fabulous idea. Foolishly full of revived spirits, promise them blueberry muffins for the Tour showing tomorrow morning.

7:30 p.m. Return home, realize house is more ovenlike than ever. No chance of baking muffins tonight.

8:00 p.m. Fruitlessly (and, admittedly, listlessly) hunt for box containing Summer ’05 VK and Frost Flowers pullover pattern. Drink water. Find Spring ’06 IK instead.

8:30 p.m. Find size 3 Addi circ and Jaeger Siena. Cast on Prairie camisole, slacker freeform heavily modified version of Veronik Avery’s Prairie Tunic, while watching end of Last of the Mohicans on television. Still a bummer when Uncas gets eviscerated and Alice jumps off a cliff. This movie is such a downer. Daniel Day-Lewis sure is tasty in it, though.

9:00 p.m. Vanity Fair on next. Too hot to try to sleep yet, might as well check it out. Rip out beginning of Prairie Camisole, which has somehow ballooned so far beyond original gauge it could engirdle a small hippo.

11:30 p.m. Vanity Fair a total wash. Have failed to comprehend all but the most major plot points. Oh well, book was on reading list anyway. Prairie camisole is finally off to a promising start.

11:45 p.m. Cold shower. Don’t even bother toweling off. Drink extra glass of water.

12:50 a.m. Still awake.

1:17 a.m. Move to window seat in hopes of draft.

1:20 a.m. Realize stark nudity in front of window probably not good for reputation in new neighborhood if anyone should happen to look up here early in the morning. Move to floor near vent.

1:50 a.m. Concede that stark nudity on scratchy wool carpet is not that comfortable.

2:00 a.m. Fetch towel from bathroom. Step on cat, who is sprawled out asleep or comatose on bathroom tiles. Drink more water.

2:02 a.m. Arrange towel on floor by vent. Lie awake contemplating shaving poor cat.

2:05 a.m. No clippers in house. Would have to use Granny’s ancient German sewing scissors, which, though mostly indomitable, probably aren’t up to a whole cat’s worth of snipping.

2:07 a.m. Cat would be laughingstock of local feline posse anyway. Already took a drubbing from Big Bossy Felix of two doors down.

2:30-ish a.m. Fall briefly asleep.

4:00 a.m. Body temperature sufficiently reduced to get back on the bed. A little more sleep.

5:20 a.m. Too hot again. Might as well get up and make muffins.

6:40 a.m. Muffins out of oven. Don least heat-retaining clothing in wardrobe, walk to Bike Gallery.

8:00 a.m. Floyd seems to have assured himself the yellow jersey. Have spun a second spindle-full of wooly singles in Axel teal; ready for plying tomorrow. Muffins have been devoured by ravenous bikers.

8:15 a.m. Return home. Think about walking down to farmers’ market for fruit. Weigh desire for fresh cherries against desire not to move. Read blogs and drink water to postpone decision.

9:15 a.m. Walk to market. Commiserate with fellow shoppers about mugginess. Envy neighbor hitching up boat trailer and other neighbor heading to the mountains to bike and camp by lake.

9:35 a.m. Return home. Realize oven has been on this whole time. Whole kitchen already felt like 375 degrees anyway.

10:00 a.m. Start to organize knitting library. Spy cat draped on floor near vent a la Salvador Dali.

10:30 a.m. Join cat on floor. Read through Folk Knitting in Estonia. Drink water.

10:35 a.m. Note absurdity of planning to knit woolen mittens when it’s at least 85 degrees indoors. Wish Portland were in Estonia.

10:38 a.m. Check weather in Estonia. Highest temperature in entire country is 74 degrees.

11:00 a.m. Better skein up this morning’s spinning to be ready for plying.

11: 27 a.m. Brainwave! Could fill tub with cold water and knit Prairie camisole while wallowing! Genius! Will let you know how it goes.

…and then, Hot Damn! I wish I could knit like my great-granny! I’m hazarding a guess that’s who made these absurdly adorable tiny booties. They’re the greatest find thus far among the things shipped out from my grandmother’s house in Connecticut. They look too antique to have been made for my dad or his brother, so I’m going to guess they go back another generation. Some ancestress, anyway, had mad knitting skills, and I’ve been trying to puzzle out exactly how these booties were constructed so I can reverse-engineer a pattern. As far as I can tell, the garter feet were knit flat and seamed up, and then the ribbed section was picked up and worked in the round. There are little short rows on the heels and everything. And the gauge? Eleven stitches per inch, people. These were worked on much tinier needles than my trusty size 0’s, another factor that makes me think they predate the 1940s. Some woman lovingly patched a few holes, and they’ve been washed enough to have gently felted. I like to think of my father having worn them as a wee baby. Now I get to save them for my own offspring. Let’s have a little more gratuitous cuteness:

Yesterday I ended the longest knitting drought I’ve had since I began nearly two years ago. I hadn’t knit since the World Cup final, if you can believe it. Four whole days without knitting! That’s because my parents were here and we all rolled up our sleeves and plunged into home improvements with scarcely a break for food, let alone fiber. (I know we could argue they’re of equal importance, but food won out because I was already starting each day spinning during the Tour de France. Need I remind you that it begins at 5:30 a.m. out here in the west, on the sane days when they have the flat stages? We will not speak of the 3:30 start for tough mountain stages like yesterday’s. Not even I am that crazy.) We painted the basement, we built 80′ of shelving (yes, that’s feet, not inches), we sawed the boxspring in half so we could get it up the stairs at last, we unpacked and unpacked and unpacked some more. And guess what? The house is still full of boxes. And all the while, I was racing to meet freelance deadlines. So when I packed off the proofread galleys of The Society of Secret Superheroes yesterday afternoon, it was finally time to treat myself to this:

Dear neglected Viennese Shrug, thy yarn is like blackberry sorbet. Why have I not finished you yet? I’ve just joined the second sleeve for working in the round, so the knitting should move quickly from here. And I couldn’t resist showing you the view above my head as I lounged in the shady back garden. Anyone spurning pink and green as “so two years ago” ought to take a gander at my mimosa tree. Those were its flowers in the pictures of Pomatomus, outrageous blooms that remind me of punk rockers, fireworks, and sea anemones.

But now it’s back to work in the basement. I can hear Mr. Garter running the power tools, and sometimes he forgets to use the level. Plus there’s another segment of wall to paint “sunporch” yellow.

A good Bastille Day to the French folk out there!

…Was my interpretation of “hippopotamus” as a child (maybe because my mother’s side of the family passed down a freakish tendency to say “tomahto”), and now it’s what comes to mind when I’m trying to remember the name of that groovy sock pattern everyone’s knitting. The first time I saw them, I knew I had to make myself a pair. I finally finished the Conwy socks, and I was too impatient to even set up a photo shoot before I cast on Pomatomus yesterday. So here’s my beginning:

Reclining in the slug-eaten calibrachoa. Poor sock deserves better, I decided. So I went around to my mother-in-law’s side of the house to pose it among the dianthus.

Much nicer. I’m using Claudia Handpainted fingering weight in “Plumlicious” – oh, how plummy! I love the way it’s working up with nary a flash nor a pool – this happy result has persisted through the first two repetitions of Chart A since I took these pictures. And I haven’t found the pattern to be too toothy yet, although I did have to tear out half a chart repetition this morning when I got a little too glued to the Germany-Sweden match. World Cup soccer is prime for knitting, by the way. Nothing is as ideal as the Tour de France*, but soccer is a close second. Unfortunately, the Viennese Shrug requires a little too much attention to the pattern to be good TV knitting, but I’d say it’s five eighths finished. Of course, I’m not going to want to model it for you while it’s 95 degrees, which is the weather we’re having this week. We’ll have to take some pictures at dawn while it’s still cool (and this is the beauty of Portland – unlike NYC, it really does cool off most comfortably after the sun goes down). Fingers crossed, but I think I’m going to be very pleased with my modifications. I’ve also finished the Scarf-for-Money, which I’ll block tomorrow and then mail back to New York. No pictures, of course, but I’ll say that should you get the chance to knit with Rio de la Plata wool, you should absolutely snap it up.

What’s next? I need to pull up my socks and just finish Rosalind’s crochet edging. I’ve totally lost steam with that project because I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to fit me very well when it’s all done, and I’ll have to find someone to whom I can give it away. I also have some design projects in the works, and an entire blanket that’s supposed to be done by October. Sigh. Don’t you just wish you could knit faster? It’s not that I don’t take pleasure in the process. I actually mind frogging much less than most people I know, because it’s so enjoyable to keep working on the piece (present issues with Rosalind notwithstanding). But there are so many ideas in my head that I just can’t keep up! I made it a goal to work on my own designs this year, and I just need to start realizing my sketches in yarn. Luckily, between the World Cup and the fast-approaching Tour, there’s lots of good knitting time blocked out.

*Coming soon: a post about what I’ll be doing during the Tour, besides cheering on Ivan Basso!