Oh, you meant THAT France.

For the second TdF KAL intermediate sprint challenge, I decided to take the France option and cook up something French from this site (kindly listed by TdF KAL co-organizer Meg). Wouldn't you know it, but I managed to pick an ITALIAN dish! I'm generally not a cooking fiend, but I do enjoy making risotto once in a while so I chose the Stage 15 recipe before realizing I was in the wrong country, so to speak. On the other hand, the cyclists head to Italy in Stage 15, so I guess that makes it okay...?

Anyway, here's my version of the Mushroom Risotto. I tried to ratchet up the French mojo by adding some Debussy and Fauré sheet music and a placemat that I think is French. The cat may or may not have spoiled the effect.



Modifications: I used dried mushrooms instead of fresh, so instead of chicken stock and porcini powder I added the water left over from soaking the mushrooms. I think chicken stock would have worked better...next time I'll probably use half of each.

I think there was another modification but I forget what it was. Oh yeah, getting a bit carried away and making the whole shebang last night at 11 pm instead of, say, today before dinner.

At least no sex was involved

This neighbourhood is getting weird. Ever since 4th of July people have been blowing up their extra firecrackers. Then a few minutes ago (just past midnight) a couple of guys outside and 3 stories down talked about the pizza they ordered. Normally I wouldn't mind this, but I think using the megaphone was excessive.

The bag, the challenge

I'm taking the Knitting Option for the first TdF KAL challenge. I'm working on a BYOB market bag and had been planning to go all out with a delicately illustrated and moving story about a sloth who gets tired of hanging out in a tree, decides to see the world, sneaks onto a plane to France by hiding in a bag (coincidentally the one I'm making--a-HA!), and...I don't know, helps a lost puppy or makes some cool new friends or something...but some technical issues* came up so all I have is this photo and some explanatory text.



I decided to make the body of the bag with cream-coloured dishcloth cotton yarn and the stripes with blue and orange yarn to match the jersey of my KAL team, Team Rabobank. This triggered a quest to find dishcloth yarn in the right shades of blue and orange. The quest, alas, has not been successful, so I'm using acrylic instead. It's slightly uncomfortable, but not as much as I had expected and certainly no more than the cotton (which I find a bit hard on my wrists). The upsides are that 1) I'll have a nifty Tour de France-themed bag; 2) if I ever make to France and take it to the markets it will probably never, ever be mixed up with someone else's bag; and 3) when wielding the bag I'll probably be able to stun a sheep at 50 paces. I've never seen an orange this bright. It could be a secret weapon in a sheep-shearing contest...unless, of course, sheep are colour-blind. I should look that up.

*1) no scanner. 2) crappy drawing software. 3) pretty crappy drawing skills. 4) no story written yet.

My socks

I think Django is kicking my butt.

The cables aren't the problem...yes, I have managed to do a couple in the wrong direction, but I caught the mistakes very quickly. It's just that I can't figure out if I have enough yarn.

The pattern calls for 2 x 175 yards of fingering weight sock yarn--Shelridge Farm Soft Touch, to be exact. I have 2 skeins of Claudia Hand Painted, each 175 yards. So theoretically, assuming the sample sock in the pattern only used up one skein, I should be able to do 3 repeats of the leg pattern (same as in the photo) before starting the heel.

I keep telling myself this, but then I look at how much yarn I actually have left in my first skein, and to me it doesn't seem like much, and I can't decide whether to frog one repeat and have a shorter leg, or to keep all the repeats and frog later if I run out of yarn.

Either way, fussing over this has distracted me enough that I made the heel flap too short and have to go and redo it now.

Hurray! Knitting!

Done, done and done

I knitted a moogle for a birthday present.





Pattern: The head, body, and limbs are from Baby Bobbi Bear. I lengthened the arms a bit. The wings, ears and pompom are my own ideas. In hindsight, I should have made the wings a bit smaller, since the felting process didn't shrink them as much as I had hoped. I thought about making a fluffy scarf like the one in the FF IX image, but decided to wait until I have some flashy fuzzy lavender yarn.
Yarn: Cascade 220 in natural, red, and purple, plus some scrap yarn for the eyes and mouth.

Nowhere near done

I decided to start my Summer of Socks KAL-ing with Django. I'm still on sock #1.



Yarn: Claudia Hand Painted in the Copper Penny colourway. I think this is the closest I've been to a yarn addiction recently...this is the third pair of socks I've knitted using CHP in less than a year. Appropriately enough, it's for the fourth Cookie A pattern I've worked on in a year and a half--I've finished Monkey and Pomatomus, I'm on sock #2 of the German Stocking, and I still have Thelonious to knit, and oh dear, I just saw some new patterns on her website.

My project for the Tour de France KAL (for now) is the BYOB bag. The yarn is Lion Brand Cotton from Fred Meyer. The cat is the usual tabby.