Vintage Pink Cardigan

The full sweater as it is right now; the cabled edge; and a close up of the shoulder seam.

The Downside of Up

I have finished the knitting on the Vintage Pink Cardigan, and started the finishing. So far I have sewn the shoulder seams and sewn in one sleeve. Tonight, my goal is to sew in the second sleeve, then move onto the side seams. May I say that it is lovely? It is. I love it. I also love pretty much everything available at This Site. I really want to buy buttons for the cardigan from them, but I can't really justify the expense. Except then I think, I spent lots of money on the yarn and have painstakingly knit and finished it all by hand. How can I not afford the most perfect buttons for it? It's a quandary. One that will have to be resolved sometime during the seaming of the thing.

This One is For Kevin

I've been going through a bit of a cycle here lately. I've been knitting, reading and cooking, all in equal measure. I re-read Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility and Persuasion. Then, done with Jane for a while I moved on to Edith Wharton and did the same with The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Not satisfied, Stephen and I took a trip to Barnes & Noble and I bought "Julie & Julia," written by Julie Powell, a food blogger that decided to embark on the monumental task of cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. Julie & Julia is the memoir that grew out of the blog and the experience in general. I finished it in two sittings, over the course of 24 hours. I enjoyed it immensely. Friday night I finished re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I forgot that at the end of the book, the dog, Karenin, dies. It made me think of Leah and I had to stop for a few minutes and sob before I could finish the book. At the moment I'm toying with re-reading Great Expectations. I haven't decided yet, but there's something about Miss Havisham's festering, putrid wedding feast coupled with Estella's cruel teasing of poor Pip that I find attractive.

Through it all I've been knitting and cooking as well. I pulled out three years of back issues of Bon Appetit and revisited some of the most interesting recipes that I've either made or envision myself making. Just in the last week or two I've made Parmesan Crusted Chicken, Potato Salad, various green salads, Mexican Wedding Cakes (eggless cookies with pistachio and dried cranberries, coated in powdered sugar), Orange Cardamom Cupcakes with Buttercream Frosting, and Chakchouka (eggs cooked with vegetables.) Tonight I plan to make glazed turnips, over a bed of redleaf lettuce and have chocolate strawberry shortcake for dessert. Stephen and I have also been brewing. We kegged the latest batch yesterday. Before we made the last batch Stephen bought a brand new stainless steel cookpot. It's fabulous because it's tall enough to prevent the dreaded boil-over onto the stove. There's nothing like trying to remove sticky wort that's been baked onto a stove top.

I'm still knitting on my Vintage Pink Cardigan. I've knit the back, front and left sides, and one sleeve. I'm now in the middle of sleeve-desolation-island. By the time I get to the sleeves of a sweater I'm thinking "Almost done!" Then I start knitting the sleeves and realize that I'm not almost done. I'm stranded on a desolate island with nothing but the sleeves to knit and an infinite amount of time to knit them in. By the time I get to the second sleeve I'm fairly certain that I will need an eternity before they are finished. I leave you with a few photos:




Strawberry Rhubarb Pie and the beer blow off bucket, overflowing.

Text, But No Pictures

People, I've been knitting. I knit a Shedir in purple Baby Ull for Dulaan. That is one awesome pattern. I knit it in the smallest size, strictly to the pattern. And it is awesome. It fits me pretty perfectly in fact, but I am going to send it off to Dulaan instead of keeping it. When my nieces were here a week and a half ago, my eldest niece LOVED it. She kept putting it on and looking at herself in the mirror. This, in spite of the fact that the hat is made of wool and it was in the 90's. Since then it has mercifully cooled off a bit.

I've also been knitting on my Vintage Pink Cardigan (VPC.) The yarn is absolutely beautiful. It's soft, and with a wonderful sheen to it. I've finished the back and the left front (the smaller front) and am well into the right front panel. So, I'm about a third of the way through (since I still have the rest of the right front panel, both sleeves, the button band and a lot of sewing to do, and probably some sort of collar.)

In non-knitting news, the farmer's market has started up again and so has our CSA share. As a result I made a fabulous strawberry-rhubarb pie this last week, with rhubarb from the market box. It's wonderful, sweet and tangy at the same time.