I was hoping Corey would stay asleep on the chair so I could demonstrate that I’d legitimately made progress on my shawl, but my counting woke him up. But this week’s book is the same size as last week’s books, so hopefully you can tell I’ve been working hard even without a 20-pound cat as a constant.

The knitting itself is not difficult, which, of course, means I’ve messed it up a bunch of times. Somehow alternating just two stitches on half the rows is harder than my brain can handle. Also, next time remind me not to wind my single ply yarn into a center-pull ball because holy hell, the knots and yarn barf I’ve had to put up with!

The advantage of actually knitting means I’m also doing a lot of reading. Sometimes it’s listening to an audiobook, which has the advantage of not needing to turn pages, but because of the aforementioned fuck-ups, I sometimes need to chant the stitches when I’m having difficulty paying attention, which then means I need to pause the book because I can’t pay attention to someone reading to me while talking aloud to my brain. Otherwise, I can read a print book, paying attention to the pattern on the right-side rows and reading a couple pages while knitting back on the wrong sides. It’s slow going, but not horrible.

On my phone, I have finished my cycling book, The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, and downloaded the first of Peter Mayle’s Sam Levitt heist series, Vintage Caper, which is about to move from Los Angeles to France. It seems appropriate for Tour de France knitting, although I’m also pretty sure I figured out who perpetrated the crime in the scene in which that character was introduced, so it’s good that I’m looking for setting in this book, rather than solid crime writing.

In print, I’ve started Jasmine Guillory’s The Proposal, a modern Los Angeles romance, in which the meet-cute happens because a writer’s boyfriend proposed to her at a Dodgers game (spelling her name wrong on the Jumbotron) and then, after she turns him down, a doctor and his sister help her escape from the media who want to interview her about it. You know, as it happens all the time. It’s light and frothy and innocuous, which is probably about right, given I can’t reliably wrap my head around two stitches.

I have Tommy Orange’s There There out from the library, so I should probably turn to that next, since there’s bound to be a long holds list for it. But if it doesn’t grab me right away, I might just return it again and resume reading my wintry books, Early Riser and Naughty on Ice, to combat our heat.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for the roundup.

Yes, Corey is awake in this picture, although he’d been sleeping shortly before. No, he didn’t go after the yarn. Yes, he is a good kitten and I told him so.

I have made it through the first section of my Tour de France knitalong shawl, which I have nicknamed Forever in Bike Shorts.

There has been some tinking, when I screwed up the pattern stitch and couldn’t figure out how to fix a knit-1-below stitch I’d dropped down to repair. But it was relatively straightforward getting it back on the needles, although I definitely would prefer not to repeat that once there are several hundred stitches on my needles, rather than just several dozen. I should definitely not attempt to knit on this while sleeping.

I did not end up picking either of the yarns I showed you on Sunday, nor the next one I tried the following day. But then, while hunting for something else, I came across this baggie of yarn I had unraveled from a sock-in-progress that had been attacked by a moth several years back. It’s Neighborhood Fibers in Dupont Circle and works really well with the Iris. (It has some purple variegation over the pink, so even when the MadTosh bleeds — the strong smell of vinegar suggests it will — it shouldn’t be a problem.) I’m excited to get to the mosaic section, although I admit that the skein now being in 12 balls ranging from a few yards to 200-300 yards is probably not quite ideal. But I will make it work because I am going to love the hell out of this thing when it’s done.

Much of my knitting thus far has been done not to bike racing on tv, but to the audiobook of Christina Uss’ The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, a middle-grade novel I started listening to in May, then had it expire on me as I was about halfway through. Bicycle grew up in a Nearly Silent Monastery in D.C. and instead of getting on a bus to go to a Friendship Factory the way her guardian intended (because she had a poor record of making friends herself), she took herself off on a cross-country bike ride to meet her cycling hero in San Francisco.

When my hands aren’t occupied, I’m still reading Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors and Red, White, and Royal Blue. I’m about halfway through both. I need to finish the former by this weekend, because otherwise I’ll have to pay the library for returning it so late.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits to check out her round-up!

The Tour de France Knitalong, which runs concurrently with the bike race, has commenced, and I have decided on a knitting pattern:

4-Ever in Blue Jeans by Cally Monster

I knew I wanted to use some purple sparkly MadTosh Sock (colorway: Iris) Rudi gave me this winter for the solid color, and Rudi and I scoured my stash for something that would be a good contrast color.

Holi Festival, also by Madelinetosh, was, somewhat reluctantly, what I settled on. I think the white base is too white, and, frankly, I suspect the purple will run, which might be fine or not, depending on how it goes.

While looking for the right needles, I stumbled across a skein I’d started a sock in that seemed like it also might work. It has gotten separated somehow from its ballband, but I’m nearly positive it’s Araucania Itata Multy, a wool-silk-bamboo rayon blend. Because it contains silk, the kinkiness where I’d knit with it seems to have flattened this end of the yarn a bit, but where I haven’t worked it yet, it looks similar to the MadTosh.

I did a bit of a swatch:

The Holi Festival skein is used at the bottom and follows the pattern exactly, but it was making my swatch double in size, so I bound off all the extra stitches and sort of approximated things at the top for the Araucania just to get it done.

What do you guys think? In the morning I’ll rip out both and start knitting with my purple yarn. I’ll have a bunch of rows before I make a commitment for that second yarn, so feel free to weigh in if you have thoughts (including if your thought is to go stash diving again).

I ripped back my Lightning Shawl to try to fix that bad color shift when I switched yarns. This might be better — or it might be equally as bad. I think I’ll have to knit another couple inches away from it in order to really tell. I’m just so ready to be done with this project. Probably I should have just stopped after the end of the last strip, but I really wanted the shawl to be a little deeper than it was…

Below is the pre-ripping. Essentially, I pulled it back to before that solid golden splotch in the middle and am trying to make the gradient before and the gradient after play nicely. I have some long ends, so I’m wondering if I use it to sort of duplicate stitch over some of the other pre-merge point to help create a better semblance of matching.

Reading-wise, I started Elizabeth Acevedo’s new novel, With the Fire on High, tonight. So far, I’m really enjoying it. (Bridget, it’s set in Philly!) It’s about a senior in high school who lives with her abuela and her two-year-old daughter, Emma, and who loves to experiment in the kitchen.

The audio copy of Jenny Han’s P.S. I Still Love You came back off the holds list for me, so that’s what I’m listening to on my phone. I need to start listening to Daisy Jones and the Six this weekend, though, in order to give the cds back to the library.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits for the round-up.

I am in a knitting funk. I don’t want to finish up old projects, so I thought maybe I’d try carrying around the equipment for something new. But the both skeins of stripey sock yarn remains untouched and the needle remains stitch-free.

I would like to get the lightning shawl finished before this year’s Tour de France, though, so that gives me just over two weeks.

I started reading Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors today while on the metro to the station nearest my library book club. I stopped at the cafe for lunch and some outdoor reading time on my bike ride home and can now say the start is rather slow. Also, Dev notes in her acknowledgements that this is an inspired by, rather than derived from, kind of story. The main characters are Indian-American Tricia, a neurosurgeon, and European-Indian caterer D.J. The start is a little slow, but I’VE heard it gets better, so I shall stick with it.

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

This needs to be short, because I dozed off writing it and I have to go to bed.

I suppose I would get further faster with my sock if I picked it up on days that didn’t start with “w.” I am through the cuff now and am ready to begin the leg.

New books started this week: Tricia Levenseller’s Daughter of the Siren Queen, the second in a duology about a female pirate & her crew, and Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi, about two friends who meet the day the girl starts college.

Head over to As Kat Knits for other book/craft combos.