I’m no closer to deciding what to knit for this year’s Tour de France knitalong than I was last year. But I promised to share some of the things I was thinking about, so, I thought I’d give you some of the 1-2 skein projects I’m looking at tonight and then share the 3+ skein projects later on. The links all go to Ravelry, should that be a helpful piece of information to you.

There are more here than I expected. And normally I would have Rudi help me filter them down and then bring them to you to help me decide. But he’s in bed and you’re always here (in a sense), so there we go.

First up is the XO Shawl. It’s knit with one skein of sock yarn and one of a silk mohair (both of which I should be able to wrangle out of my stash).

The Seladonia Shawl would give me the push to finally learn brioche

Either Winterberry, Crunch Time, or Orkidae Shawl would use two skeins of the same color. That gives me at least one option, but possibly just that.

Kingston Lacy could be knit in either fingering or lace, which gives me several options.

If I knit the Little Rainbow Shawl, I’d probably combine a solid with a gradient, rather than using mini skeins, which I don’t own.

Full Charged comes from the designer I knit my purple and pink 4-Ever in Blue Jeans shawl from two years ago.

Stonechurch is another mosaic design (colorwork done by slipping stitches, rather than knitting with two colors on the same row), which I seem to be attracted to a lot this past year.

Flowers in the Air is knit with a mohair blend and uses beads. The beaded socks I started knitting earlier this spring quickly went sideways, but I don’t really think that was the beads’ fault. Wispy Shawl doesn’t have any beads to complicate things.

Escanda uses just a single skein of sock yarn.

Hennes combines a solid and a variagated or self-striping skein.

What do you think? Do any of these catch your eye? Or, even better, have you made any of them yourself?

It’s been a crummy workweek, with one coworker leaving and the news that my boss is being switched into a new position a week after she gets back from vacation, and somehow deadlines don’t ever get crossed off. Volleyball was canceled due to rain. It was ridiculously hot and then ridiculously rainy, and I spent way too much time sitting in my apartment. I worked my butt off to clear enough stuff to be able to keep my laptop closed this weekend (and mostly my remaining colleagues are interested in keeping me sane) and this is how I’m going to spend my time:

• Spend several hours in the garden. I have some more planting to do. There are peas and greens to be picked. I want to get beans and the last of the plants I picked up in Connecticut into the ground.
• Go to the farmers market. We’re getting close to the end of strawberry season, but that means cherries, blueberries, and raspberries are on their way in.
• Swim. While I did bike down to meet my coworker to take her to a goodbye lunch, my only other activity has been swimming. The outdoor pool is only open on weekends for the next few weeks, so I need to get myself moving a little earlier.
• Knit outside. Tomorrow is Worldwide Knit in Public Day. I have no qualms about knitting pretty much anyplace, but I think my rainbow sock will be super popular in Dupont on Pride Weekend.
• Pick up holds at two libraries. I didn’t get to either library last weekend, so now I need to get to both this weekend. (One is in Virginia, so it’s less convenient than it might otherwise be.)
• Buy books. It’s the quarterly member sale at one of my local bookshops.
• Have a belated birthday happy hour for Rudi at our local watering hole. (It’s also a fancy grocery store and has some tasty food options they make in-house, including a surprisingly good grilled cheese. We also have a gift card from last spring that expires next week, so that’s a nice bonus.)
• Do laundry. How do I have no clean tshirts?
• Paint my nails. I keep only thinking of it right before bed.
• Sleep.

How about you? What are you hoping to get to this weekend? (And lest you worry overmuch about my working too hard, next week I have fun evening activities on three days and maybe plans to go to the beach on Saturday.)

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Getting to swim at the outside pool.

2. I take my supper and my book up to the park while Rudi’s on evening Zoom calls. It starts out sweltering, but fades to pleasant.

3. Many of the members of my team at work, staff and contractors, gather at my boss’ house for an afternoon picnic. We all greet each other with relieved hugs.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

I finished up print and audio books this week and will complete the toe of my first sock tomorrow.

In the ears, I’ve started Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert, the third of the Brown sisters trilogy. I’m sad to wrap up their tales, but hold out hope the author will give their grandmother, Gigi, her own book(s).

On paper, I’m about to begin Mia P. Manansala’s Arsenic and Adobo, in which the main character’s life is described on the back cover as swerving from “Nora Ephron romp to an Agatha Christie case.” It’s slightly overdue, but I expect to quickly tear through it. (And our library system doesn’t charge fines, so it’s simply my own guilt over being a bad library citizen I need to overcome.)

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting this week.

Part of finding a sense of normalcy as the pandemic winds down is to return to things we had to postpone. Rudi and I used to love going to the movies, and, in fact, went to two in the final days before the world shut down in March 2020.

Here are the movies I’m most looking forward to seeing in the cinema:

In the Heights (June)
Black Widow (July)
Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (July)
Respect (August)
Dear Evan Hansen (September)
Come from Away (September)’
The Addams Family 2 (October)
Eternals (November)
West Side Story (December)
Spiderman: No Way Home (December)

How about you? Are you looking forwad to trips to the theater?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share Books I Loved that Made Me Want More Books Like Them. I couldn’t think of titles that sent me scrambling for read-alikes, but I could come up with a list of books that made me want to read everything its author had written/will write:

1. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (I used to save money for trips to Waldenbooks at the Meriden Square, where I went through all the Anne books and into Montgomery’s other series/standalones.)
2. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (I might not love everything he writes, but I will read it.)
3. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell (I recognize this book has some problems with the portrayal of Park, but I loved it.)
4. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (This is another book with some problems in terms of racial interactions, which Kingsolver tried to address in her later Pigs in Heaven. I haven’t reread it in a long time and can’t speak for how it holds up, but I adore it has made me a Kingsolver devotee.)
5. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle (Pretty sure it’s time for a reread of this classic tale of home improvement and cultural miscues)
6. The 13 Clocks by James Thurber (I don’t know how to best categorize Thurber’s works except maybe to say it has a strong moral compass and a witty soul.)
7. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (Another must-read author of my youth. I’ve even read her religious essays.)
8. When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin (Her descriptions are pure poetry.)
9. A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd (This book conveys such a love of words!)
10. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (I adored his way of telling stories through both words and pictures.)

Other books in this same category include Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, Booked by Kwame Alexander, and The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon.

How about you?