Aux Champs-Élysées

Aux Champs-Élysées, aux Champs-Élysées
Au soleil, sous la pluie, à midi ou à minuit
Il y a tout ce que vous voulez aux Champs-Élysées.
(words and music by Pierre Delanoé)

Translation:
On the Champs-Élysées, on the Champs-Élysées
In the sun, in the rain, at noon or at midnight
There's everything that you could want on the Champs-Élysées.

The last French immersion weekend I went on a few years ago was a real mixed bag: I came back with a lot of great photographs and book ideas (one of which I'm working on for a deadline next month), as well as some really, ah, not pleasant moments that have kept me from going back again.

One of the best experiences was learning to sing this song on the bus on the way out to the Kananaskis Field Station (part of the Biogeoscience Institute of the University of Calgary), and it was running through my brain about as fast as the riders on the last stage of the Tour de France made their way on the Champs-Élysées.

(Check out this great music video of Paris to the song!)

And as they crossed the finish line, I, too, finished my Tour de Fleece by spinning another great length (20 meters) of fine, two-ply linen bookbinding thread: everything, with the exception of one bobbin of black Merino I spun for another project, is in the picture above. It wasn't easy, and on one day, it just wasn't fun, but I did spin every day the Tour was on the road, and finished spinning for My Past Life. In fact, not spinning this morning felt strange.

I'm hoping all the thread will enable me to do my first sewn binding from Volume II of Kevin A. Smith's Non-Adhesive Bindings collection. I've almost settled on which binding I'm going to use, and am adapting it for seven sections (from three).

So now I'm trying to finish a couple of long-standing WIPs (Works-In-Progress) in order to retrieve the circular needles they are mounted on to prepare for my knitting projects during the Olympics.

Il y a tout ce que vous voulez aux Champs-Élysées.