Textiles and Bicycles

That’s what I am.

I ordered my first French Phildar magazine, because the selections that have been translated into English are not as abundant.  And I love the new summer issue.

The thing is I speak zero French…well, I know j’mappelle Monica.  Parle vous Frances? And then I start speaking Spanish or Portuguese (badly).

But.  Thanks to this fantastic site, this article, and my own shocking genius, I translated my first French pattern for this beauty, which will be done with a lot of leftover blue-grey Rowan Purelife:

In celebration of my linguistic feat, I’ve already plotted my next project:

The catalogue is mix of 80s inspired dresses (which are cute) and huge cardigans (lots o ugliness in my opinion) and then the summery meshy stuff above.  My new-ish requirement is there have to be interesting new techniques that I haven’t done before (or know how to do) in order for me to knit it at this point.  The reason being I have enough clothes and not enough money to justify making everything I think is lovely.  I’ve also been doing a great job with my “green” yarn only challenge.  I just ordered me some Blue Sky Dyed Cotton and the new Limited Edition Malabrigo cotton, which has to last me through the next few months.

All in all, translating the pattern was much easier than I thought.  The thing is speaking knitspeak is far more important to understanding these patterns than speaking French.  In fact I’m not sure a French speaker who doesn’t speak knitting would be able to understand the pattern (like when I saw my first knitting pattern in English).  It’s just a matter of translating the abbreviations — half way through I was flying through the translation.  I only got stumped a few times, which was more a reflection of the weirdness of the pattern.  It has no shaping except for some minor decreases embedded into the stitch pattern, not even armhole shaping.  The diagram even shows 2 simple squares for the front and back.

Maybe my next challenge will be translating all the amazing Japanese patterns I know are out there.  A slightly harder task I feel…