I've got my wool to keep me warm...

For Christmas, my parents, who want me to stay warm, gave me a base layer set - an undershirt and leggings - from Icebreaker, a New Zealand company that makes Merino wool clothing. I got the mid-range base layer (200) - which should stand me in good stead through most Ontario winter days, especially if I'm on the move. We'll see: can't wait to test it out on the bike. I've already worn it cross-country skiing and it performed just fine.

Merino's pretty nifty stuff - it insulates, it breathes like crazy, it's super lightweight (you'd never know this stuff was made from wool: it feels almost like cotton, just warmer), and when it does wear out, which won't be for quite some time, you can compost it. This stuff is really thin, and it's surprisingly soft. In our family we listen, every Christmas Eve, to A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, and the narrator talks about "aunts who always wore wool next to the skin" and who give "mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all." This is not that wool. Far from it. I wore it out skiing on Christmas Day and most of the day on Boxing Day. So stretchy, so soft, so warm.

So, I'll have to try it out on the roads, when I get back to Ottawa and Mike. I'm really looking forward to having the leggings to wear under my jeans - what is it that makes denim so very very cold?

I found a tag on the shirt that gave me a unique "BAAcode" that, presumably, allows me to trace the wool in my item to the sheep stations it was grown on in New Zealand. I don't know if I believe that or not, but I did go check it out on their site, entered my code, and found out where my shirt was when it was on the hoof. And then I spent a while just clicking around reading about merino, checking out videos of the station owners, looking at pictures of herds of wooly sheep. Great website design. I was totally sucked in.

Now... I get to find out if a New Zealand sheep can grow wool that can hack an Ottawa winter. Hah!

... more style!

A friend sent me this link, to a blog on academic style (or stylish academia?) called Academichic.com - a post on cycling style. Right now going through these pictures causes more jealousy than inspiration - hard to be stylish on a bike in Ottawa in November. I'm living in a daily uniform of jeans (one leg tucked into a sock) and three layers, the top layer being the zip-out fleece lining of a light winter jacket. Sure, I could bundle up in a nice coat, but I don't want all my nice winter coats to wind up with a spattered stripe up the back, and that's what happens. Ditto the Victorian walking boots I just picked up from Clockwork Couture - they'll just get soaked. And do heels fit inside the shoe covers I got at MEC? (Actually, they might. Would look hilarious.)

I guess I feel like there are certain limitations connected to the kind of cycling you do. I'm a couple of miles away from downtown by any estimation, and the roads I take to get there are big, loud, dirty, and busy. Mike is as burly and gutsy as he needs to be to get me from place to place, but he's not really conducive (as I've mentioned before) to pretty clothes. More than Mike, though, the roads aren't. You just don't see women like the one in this picture beyond the confines of the true urban. Heading out to the suburbs you see the folks in Spandex and clip-toe shoes, with the mirrors on their helmets, or you see people like me in jeans and hoodies, but you're less likely to run into a sundress and heels on the way down, say, Conroy or West Hunt Club. On the pathways, maybe: once the pathways run out, someone dressed like that starts to look a little like a Minnesota tourist family that's just wandered into the wrong part of Amsterdam.

But, for the kind of objective pleasure that flipping through magazines, or gourmet cookbooks, or watching Fashion Television affords, this post is just great. So are:

Girls and Bicycles
Copenhagen Cycle Chic
Let's Go Ride a Bike
Chic Cyclist (and I love the current post "You Don't Have to Ride Your Bike" because it states perfectly something I didn't even realize I wanted to say!)

And just to plug Clockwork Couture, because I loves me my steampunk (although watch out for their shipping department, they can be a pain in the ass): their "casual cycling capris" are want-inducing. Although they don't make them in my size I guarantees ya.

Reasons I Need More Money

After I posted the site for Yakkay, I sent the link off to Miss Scarlett's owner, knowing she would probably go into transports over the pink tweed "Tokyo" helmet. Which she did. And then, while I was busy lamenting the fact that they didn't seem to have an online store, she put her googling skills to work and found the following places in the UK and France that carry them, and sell online. Now I just have to lament the fact that the Yakkay helmets are about £95 from all of them... and that I'm now looking at the beautiful capes and messenger bags and ... are those reflective spats? The side of me that sighs over anything steampunk must, for the good of my wallet, be suppressed!

London Cyclechic
Bobbin Bicycles
50cycles
And Cycledélic in France.

Now it's true that Mike and I are anything but fashion leaders. And I might look a little silly in some of this wonderfully Eurochic gear, bashing along Bank Street on Mike, who is a bit of a thug really and wouldn't know what to do with a cravat (other than maybe tuck it into a back pocket á la James Dean or something.) These clothes are more suited to a five-speed city cruiser like most of the bikes on these sites. And those are bikes designed for the cobblestones and paved pathways and small streets in Europe. I lived in Bonn, Germany, when I was eighteen, and biked to high school. It was great - and I still have flashbacks, in the fall, when the air gets cooler and damper and you can smell the fallen leaves starting to turn to mould, of the trip to school on the white bike I borrowed from my host family, the autumn streets and the paving-stone yard of the school I went to.

It was much more civilized than my seven-mile crank to work. It involved better posture, and a little bell, and crosswalks and side streets that cars couldn't fit on, and the ability to pedal along and have a conversation with your companion. And you could be well dressed, nay, even stylish. (And man, were my classmates stylish: even the goths were immaculate.)

And maybe there's a smidge of nostalgia in my longing for stylin' bike clothes. I was never into Spandex, and MEC is more my usual comfort zone, but sometimes I get all romantic over the idea of being... so gosh darn European. Mike, however, feels differently. I get the feeling if I got him a wicker basket or an embellished chainguard he might rebel.

Helmetty awesomeness

Going through the comments tonight, I came across my friend Paul's link to these ... what else can I call them? Saviours from helmet dorkiness. Yakkay make a fedora-style pinstripe helmet, a mailboy style helmet, a furry Russian-looking helmet. What else can I say but hooray?

Every so often, in the past, I have thought I was, weirdly, sidelong, envious of the people with helmet covers with devil horns or dragon spines or whatever. But something in me also said, yeah, what else do they make in that mode? Toddler hats. Toddlers and cyclists wear things with stuffed kitty ears or dragon tails attached to them. People keep making helmet covers that look like - face it - like novelty tea cosies. Cute, yes, but would I feel silly biking to work wearing them? Uh... yes.

This, though, is a whole new level of helmet cover. This is pretty damn cool. I so want one.

A couple of things I've learned...

One: Bixi operates in Ottawa/Gatineau! How long has this been going on, and why didn't I know about it?

If you don't know Bixi, it's a public bike-share system, where you pay by credit card to sign out one of their beautifully-designed bikes. I discovered this when a woman I work with arrived at our venue for a reading tonight on one of their bikes; there's a stand near where she lives in Gatineau. They're hard to miss. Distinctive. Sturdy but not, somehow, unlovely.
The idea is that you get a membership, or you pay by the hour, to take one of their bikes from a self-serve, solar-powered stand. Then you truck around doing whatever you need to do, and drop it off at any of their locations (doesn't even have to be the one you left from.) How cool is that?

The other thing I've learned is: if you're heading south along the canal after dark, you have two choices: Queen Elizabeth on the west side of the canal, or Colonel By Drive on the east side.

Take Colonel By. I had never before realized how much of a difference it makes to be travelling beside a road and going in the same direction as the cars in the nearest lane. If you're heading in the opposite direction, those buggers are blinding. Then you can't see the pedestrians in front of you because of the glaring retina-burning headlights, and you run a nasty risk of hitting them. Plus, for some reason, there are more joggers and pedestrians on the Queen Elizabeth side. Or at least there were tonight, when it was still about 35 degrees Celsius at 9:30 PM.

Oh, and thanks to Sari for this link, which she sent me after the last post about skirts and bikes... I spent the weekend in Toronto, and damn if there aren't a lot of gorgeous people on bikes in that city. Including a great many well-dressed women in skirts.

...with style!

It's strange to admit it, but in the two years since I started getting around by bike, I have never ridden in a dress. I did, for the first time, tonight.

I mean, what's more deliciously urban, more Continental, more bohemian-beauty than a woman riding a bicycle in a dress? There's something about it, and for some reason riding in a dress has become, for me, a visual symbol of true bikesmanship. Forget relegating your bike to your grubby clothes and your leisure time, riding in style means that your bike really has become part of your life. And let's face it, it's damn sexy.

Yes? We agree?

Now the problem is that Mike's not really a girl's bike. He's a chunky, leggy, inelegant mountain bike. He's gauche. Brusque. Not high society at all. And me and Mike don't go at the sorts of speeds that are conducive to wearing a dress. But the thing is, it was 30 degrees or more out this afternoon when I left work to go to my friend Marie's book launch (for her book Warrior of Darkness, Hades Publications, go look it up and get the first book too) and I'd switched into the dress I brought to wear to the launch while I was at work, to stay cool.

Now, those who know me know that I don't wear dresses often. So this was weird enough. But then I was running late from work and needed to get to the event, and I hate coming into an event, saying hello to everyone, then running to the washrooms to get changed in a bathroom stall because I need to be wearing the pretty shoes. So I just pulled on my (mid-calf) biking shorts under the dress and headed over.

Yup. There really is something about biking in a dress. Something that says, "yes, world, I really am that artsy, independent, urban, and not only that, I get around without all that silly worrying about smudging makeup - and why? Because no matter what, I will look fantastic when I get there!"

Even if you do arrive sweaty, smudgy, and with helmet hair and wrinkles in the back of your dress. It's all worth it, just to change lanes on the way off the Laurier bridge over the canal and halt in three-lane traffic with your pretty painted toes touching down next to your bike. I know it's all selfrighteousness. But you still feel sexy biking in a dress, you do!

So on the way out of the book launch, and its ensuing dinner and drinks, I opted to leave the biking shorts off. It was dark, which made me bolder. The dress is a cotton sundress that comes down to a little above my knees. Once you're biking, and there's a breeze, that 'little above' becomes a lot above. But I know that generally, physics are kind, and I'm never as exposed as I feel like I am. (And if I am, really, who cares?) I had to go a little slower than I normally do, but not by much, and at every stop light the dress fell back down to a more comfortable level.

I certainly felt more urban-chic while I was still downtown: once I passed Lansdowne Park on the way south on Bank Street, and things started getting more... outer-city... my mental image of myself as one of those lovely Italian damsels you see in sepia-toned prints did kind of fade, but by then there was no one on the sidewalks anyway. And I still had pretty painted toes, and if anyone had a problem with seeing more of my legs than usual (I'm the first to admit, there can be way too much of my legs visible) it didn't matter to me!

Admittedly, on my morning hyperdriven commute to work down the River Pathway, I'm still not likely to wear a dress. But I now know I could, if I wanted to. Ha!

(Incidentally, Mike's not the most dress-compatible bike. I like the way his guy-ish frame and 2-inch tires jar with anything feminine, and with the distances I need to cover with him I wouldn't have him any other way ... but he does lack some of the grace of one of those gorgeous, long-lined, single-speed, pedal-braking beauties you see on downtown streets. You know, the ones with the wicker baskets and the arching handlebars. One of which he met this evening: they were locked at adjacent parking meters while her owner and I were at the book launch. Her name is Miss Scarlet. She's devastatingly lovely, and apparently has stories to tell...)