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!

Meet my little cousin Asa. He’s three and a half, hell on wheels, utterly charming, and therefore a tempting victim when I cut my teeth on knits for shorties. Back in the spring, my lifelong amiga Abbie asked for a cute kiddie sweater recommendation for her nephew Leif. A design idea came to me in a flash and I scribbled a raglan pullover with a traveling stitch motif up the raglan lines and panels of stockinet and reverse stockinet on the body and sleeves. I rummaged up some ancient Cleckheaton Country 8-Ply Naturals from my mother-in-law’s stash and cast on a couple of months ago. I finished just in time to try it on the little dude at the big summer party last weekend — family and hometown friends galore, plus a six-foot boa constrictor. The boa swam in the pond, which the kids thought was awesome, although some of the adults weren’t fully on board with the idea. (I spent a lot of time making sure small children like this one didn’t drown in the pond. It’s a nervous business, the whole lots-of-kids-in-water thing. We played man-to-man defense for a while but eventually had to switch to zone when a medium-size guy who actually can swim stayed in too long, got tired, and had to be rescued…all’s well that end’s well, anyway.) It was a hot day: great for water play, but my little cuz wanted no part of a wool sweater. When the sun finally sank below the trees he was up for modeling, providing I pushed him over the lumpy parts of the meadow:

He wore it the rest of the night and even managed not to get marshmallow all over the front when his brother made him a s’more. He really likes it.

Verdict? The pattern needs work. The arms are too skinny, so I’m doing the math to plump them up before Abbie casts on a version for Leif. And I’m going to have to knit a bigger one if Asa is going to wear it when the weather actually gets cold again. But I think I’m going to like it when it’s done. If the pattern proves sound, I’ll offer it here.

For a knitting blog, this one has been pretty pathetic with the content of late. I am knitting, I am. I just can’t show you much of the Shibui project, and the little boy sweater I’ve been cooking up needs a good stiff blocking before it will lie still for photography. In desperation, I offer you a scintillating glimpse of… stockinet and 2×2 ribbing!

This, friends, is the better part of a Frost Flowers sleeve. More mindless knitting can scarcely be conceived of, but it’s about what I’ve been good for this week under the dread thumb of the virus. I was afraid this Trendsetter Spiral (and I hereby swear it’s the last time you’ll see me knit with such unnatural fiber – I trusted Norah Gaughan, but now I think her patrons told her she had to do something with this yarn and she just gave the salute and did the best she could. If I hadn’t been so wet behind the ears as a knitter when I took this project on, I would have substituted a decent cotton at least.) was going to look like a pox victim knit up, but I’ve decided it’s more like the hide of some desert-dwelling feline. The African Plastic Sand Leopard, recently extinct and known to Western science only through the appearance of its skin in ceremonial robes among the native tribal elders.

But hey, check out those surprise flowers that suddenly popped up in my garden! I’ve been so tickled all year to see what my new yard is going to do next. I’ve added almost nothing to it because every month brings something unexpected sprouting up just where I’d thought about putting some new plant or other. Who knew I was the owner of a foxglove and a calla lily?

I’m also the owner of some fabulous discount Rowan Plaid in Soft Kelp:

I’m thinking Leaf Lace Pullover ala Teva Durham. I loved knitting with Rowan Plaid so much during the construction of Lightning and my very first sweater for my mom that I had to spring for some more at half price. And a skein of sock yarn, because who can resist discount sock yarn? I love you, Webs. In the interest of full disclosure, this is not my own stash enhancement of late. On the whole, I’ve been pretty good, considering that I work in a yarn store and they give me a wicked discount. Last night I caved and came home with a skein of Artyarns Supermerino 4 in colorway 139, the most enchanting mix of sky blues and grass greens. It was new in the store and I could tell that it wanted so badly to be a wee baby hat for our neighbors’ firstborn, due in September. I had to take pity on it and give it what it wanted. And then there was Habu bamboo laceweight. Oh, the happy knitter born into an era where technology makes such treasure possible. Get thee to Knit/Purl, on foot or online (it might not be up on the site until Monday or Tuesday), if you don’t have easy access to Habu itself. It’s new, it’s fabulous, you’ll wonder where it’s been all your lace-knitting life. I brought home a skein of shimmery, sleek charcoal, 515 yards for the absurdly reasonable price of $15 and a nickel. It’s so pretty I almost don’t trust myself to photograph it. I want to mail it off to Jared so it can have its portrait taken properly, but I know he’d never give it back. Victorian Lace Today, here I come!

I’m happy to report that two-year anniversaries are just as nice as one-year anniversaries. Last year we spent June 18 at Mr. G’s parents’ beach house. It was kind of grey and drizzly for June, and the coast tends to sock in with fog, but that just made for more cozy indoor snuggling. This year we went upscale. We traipsed out the Columbia Gorge, and the weather turned beautiful. It’s hard to top the Gorge for scenic splendor:

Here’s the hubby’s two-years-of-wedlock portrait. He looks miserable, right?

…and mine…

(Pssst… that’s my newly sewn skirt. I heart Amy Butler fabrics. My attraction made all kinds of sense when I realized she works for Rowan.) We took the old Columbia Gorge Highway, a twisty little two-lane road built in the early 1900s that clings to the skirts of the cliff. The modern I-84 runs just below (all the way to Boston), and it’s about as pretty a trip as you can make on an interstate, but the historic road has more charm and spins you right past the feet of numerous waterfalls and grandpappy conifers.

Here’s where we were going:

Nothing like a little old-fashioned romance in a 1920s hotel above the river. There was strolling in the gardens, watching the cliff swallows wheel and dart over the waterfall, a vodka gimlet at the bar before supper (for me; abstemious Mr. Garter had iced tea), dressing for dinner (the wedding stole made an appearance), a slow dance on the lawn under the stars (we needed a little gentle exercise after the endless dinner courses), the bed turned down with a rose and tasty little cakes on the bedside tables… in short, the works. Next year we’ll probably go camp out in the wilderness for contrast, but it was fun to treat ourselves this once.

The next morning we took a little spin up out of the Gorge and into the surrounding farmland before we had to mosey back to the city. The views are just as marvelous when you’re not looking at the river, it turns out:

For those of you who haven’t been to Oregon yet, this is Mt. Hood. You can see her from lots of places in Portland, but not quite this close and personal. Hood is only 11,289 feet high — nothing to many of the Rockies; a footstool beside the Himalayas — but because of the way she rears up out of the hills alone, she’s absolutely majestic. This mountain always makes me think of the ancient Greeks and their gods on Olympus. If we have local gods, I suspect they call this peak home.

Back in Stumptown, I scampered off to meet my girl Katrin for an afternoon of window shopping and manicures, partly to make up for the way we botched her birthday over the weekend and partly just because it was a Tuesday and it happened that neither of us had to work. I believe this was our first outing that didn’t involve knitting — we realized too late that we could have been wielding the needles whilst we soaked our feet in the pedicure spa, alas. I have got a little knitting to show you, but this post runneth over and needeth no more pictures. I’ll save it for tomorrow or Sunday. Happy Summer, everybody. The Farmer’s Almanac would like to offer you this advice for your weekend: Grate potatoes and apply to sunburned skin. The starch will cool and soothe the burn. They’d also like you to know that tomorrow is the best day to cut hair to encourage growth.