I came home from Knitting Camp determined not to buy any more yarn for a good long while. My suitcase was stuffed full of Unspun Icelandic, Jamieson’s Shetland Jumper Weight, angora-wool blend from Kimmet Croft for some Bohus experiements, Satakieli for mittens and a hat (and a couple of skeins as a present for a friend), and a gorgeous lone skein of Bartlett Aran-weight called Blackberry that was too tasty to leave behind. And the home stash is already, shall we say, sizable. But as soon as I figured out I was going to run short of yarn for the secret cardigan, I panicked. I ran all over town (and this town has a lot of yarn stores) in search of a substitute. Sometime I’ll show you a picture of my new Yellow Yarn stash. I was contemplating everything from unraveling a sportweight to get at a single ply to dyeing blanks myself. I was ready to try some Koigu sock yarn in a promising color. I ordered a variegated skein online that looked like it incorporated the right yellow, even though I knew I’d have to experiment with bleaching the darker brown portions. And finally I took the advice of a cool-headed reader and went over to Ravelry to see if anyone was willing to swap some stash. It’ll never work, I thought. The yarn I’m using is too obscure and too old. Even if someone had something I know comes in a similar color and preparation, like Malabrigo Lace, there’s no way I could get it in time to meet my deadline.

And then there they were. Three beautiful cheese-doodle marigold skeins of Malabrigo Lace in Sunset. In the stash of a local knitter who happens to be a friend of a friend, with whom I’ve already corresponded on Ravelry: Tracy knit one of my favorite versions of the Twisted Tree pullover for her younger son. Tracy was willing to let me buy one of her skeins, so yesterday evening I cycled up to her house, met her family, had a little chat, and cycled home again with the precious ball tucked into my backpack. I’m alternating rounds with the old yarn and the new, but the match is so good you can’t even tell.

That’s my first try at a tubular bind-off, by the way. It takes an age in comparison with the old leapfrog standby, but doesn’t it look nice?

I did it last night while I was watching History Boys, which I liked up until the bizarre ending. (We looked it up and found it was adapted from a play, which makes perfect sense, and also that the cast were mostly the stage actors from the original production, which explains how good they were.)

Anyway, I’m finishing one sleeve tonight and since there’s no seaming to be done, I have every hope of finishing by the end of the Tour! A thousand thanks, Tracy. If good karma doesn’t flood your way for this kind act immediately, I’ll personally go beat it out of the bushes and shoo it towards your front door.

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!

Saturday mornings are for the farmers’ market. I thought my nascent cardigan might look fine reposing among the fresh produce and, for the sake of the composition, the bottle I saved from the best wine I’ve tasted since the Brunello we brought back from Montalcino in 2003.

The Red Russian kale went into an experimental Indian-esque dinner in the following way: I sautéed half a yellow onion in olive oil, added a can of chick peas, then stirred in some chopped fresh ginger, a Murchi curry blend (I went a little overboard and it wound up pretty hot – a couple of teaspoons would have done the trick), a handful of unsweetened coconut shavings, and a dash of hot pepper flakes. I removed the kale “backbones” and roughly chopped the leaves, then threw them into the mix. At this point I needed some liquid to keep it all from sticking. There happened to be some apple cider (sweet, not hard) in the icebox, so I poured in a slosh of that. Then I noticed our growler from the local brewery was in there, too, and still had a glug of flat pale ale in it. Into the pot it went, to counteract a little of the sweetness of the apple juice and deepen the flavor a bit. As soon as the kale had steamed it was done. I shaved a little ricotta salata over the plates to serve it, on the theory that the mild, salty cheese could stand in for proper paneer. It turned out pretty tasty! I often cook this way, starting with a good fresh main ingredient and improvising based on what happens to be in the cupboards. Sometimes the result isn’t what I could hope, but mostly it works out well. And luckily my husband is a good sport about it (not that he has an alternate choice, unless he cooks himself).

We also bought raspberries, and unfortunately Mr. G figured he could dispense with their little boxes and pour them all into a plastic bag. The fragile little beauties promptly squashed each other and I knew they wouldn’t last out the day. We ate a bowl each, and then I made freezer jam. The half a cup of mashed raspberries left over went into a fruity cocktail each:

I adapted an internet recipe and it came out a bit too strong and too sweet, but here’s what I’d do next time:

half a glass of crushed ice
1/4 c. mashed raspberries
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 measure light rum
a slice of lemon

Yum!

Today the chard, spinach, courgettes, and summer squash will join a trio of eggplants in a couple of pans of lasagne. One will be for us and a friend who’s coming to dinner; the other we’ll freeze for our friends who just brought home their beautiful new son.

Meanwhile, the Tour continues, and so does my progress on the yellow cardigan. If this piece of knitting has its equivalent of the Pyrenees, that’s where I am, right along with the cyclists. Two more rows and I can put the sleeve stitches on waste yarn, but those rows are awfully long. The Alps will be the part where I have to pick up stitches and work a 1 x 1 ribbed edge around the whole body, but luckily I’ve got a couple of flatter stages in between to race down the rest of the cropped torso. Overall, I’m feeling good about my chances for the maillot vert!

Of course, there’s going to be a major interruption in my focus on this piece. Pro riders are required to report their whereabouts to the team leadership even during the off-season, so I’ll follow suit: on Thursday I’m leaving for Meg Swansen’s Knitting Camp in Wisconsin, and I’m perfectly giddy with anticipation! I may have to put down the yellow cardi for a couple of days, but I intend to be knitting constantly for four days. And I’ve got a project in my head that will employ the techniques I need to work on at Camp without sacrificing the French connection – stay tuned! I’m off to wind the yarn I have to pack and do some weeding before the sun comes fully over the trees to bake me.

July means several things to me: my birthday and the years’ worth of memories of elaborate treasure hunts, games on horseback, camping, and astronomy that go with it; the reliable start of halcyon summer in the Pacific Northwest; evenings outdoors enjoying the long light (though twilight comes much sooner in Portland than in my hometown) fresh produce from local farmers; and in recent years, the Tour de France.

When I probe for the origins of my obsession with the world’s greatest cycling race, I come up with the confluence of nostalgia for my first trip to France in 1998, a bleak city winter in New York, and my husband’s foray into triathlons. I think it was in 2005 that we discovered you could find video archives of previous Tours online, and I think I was the one to suggest teasingly to Adam that watching Lance Armstrong power up an Alp or two might bring his training sessions on the stationary bike to a new level. Before I knew it, I was ensconced on the couch (at an awkward angle; there was no room in our tiny apartment for the couch and the bike to face the computer at once) with my knitting, totally absorbed in the new world coming through the small grainy picture on the screen. The drama of the mountain stages, the cat-and-mouse in the peloton pulling back a breakaway or setting up a sprint finish, the beauty of the French landscape (my imagination ably filled in what the video quality left to be desired). The titanic rivalry of Armstrong and Ullrich, the death-defying descents, the colorful commentators and tifosi. I was hooked. When one year’s footage was over, we went back to the previous year. Soon I was watching the stages alone when Adam was working late. We didn’t have a television for that summer’s edition, but by 2006 we’d moved to Portland. We settled in our new house on July 4th, just in time to meet our cycling neighbors and learn that the bike store where they work would be showing the live Tour coverage at 6 a.m. each day. I got up extra early the first morning and made fresh ginger scones to share with the diehards who stopped in before work. Then I mesmerized them with my drop spindle while we all watched the race unfold.

To my dismay, the Bike Gallery stopped screening the Tour after that first year. But by 2007 we’d inherited a television, and I could stumble down in my pajamas, brew some coffee, and leave the door open for the neighbors to come join me. If the stage wasn’t over by the time I had to leave for work, I’d catch the end of the prime time coverage that evening. And always, knitting was bound up in the experience. Of course I joined the Tour knitalong as soon as Debby told me it was in the works. Last year, I translated a French pattern and set myself the task of completing a complicated cardigan during the three weeks of the race.

And this year? I have to keep the details of my project under wraps, as it’s for publication. But I’ll tell you this: it’s a vintage-inspired cropped cardigan in an unusual lace pattern, and it is every bit as yellow as the maillot jaune. It’s like buttercups, crocuses, daffodils, and Cheetos in a blender. I love it unreasonably. Maybe I’ll show you a little corner of it here and there, just to be a tease. It’s only five inches long and already I’m fantasizing about wearing it in Paris some spring with a voluminous skirt cut like it’s 1959, strolling the hidden gardens, reading on park benches, devouring daintily nibbling pastries at sidewalk cafés. Or maybe lurking in a slinky dress in a dark bar with a glass of absinthe, conjuring the ghosts of Degas, Picasso, Hemingway, and Toulouse-Lautrec, because it’s a versatile little number. (I’m not convinced absinthe would be all that pleasant to drink, but just say it aloud: “glass of absinthe” – what poetry.) Or best – and most realistically – of all, cycling the streets of Portland. If I can only find some wicker panniers for my Bianchi Milano, I’ll be able to pretend I’m a stylish French girl riding home from the market with produce and baguettes. And just think of all the knitting I could stash in the bottom.