Noro Sarubia mohair/silk cardigan, stockinette with crocheted edges. I love the crocheted buttonholes--they're so clean and hold their shape so nicely.
(I wore it on an actual, bona fide, swear-to-god DATE last night--I'm pretty sure it's good luck.)
The term 'April showers' always makes me think of that classic elementary school joke:
--If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?
--The Pilgrims!
Hee.
It was rainy (and hailing!) for lot of the weekend, and I hung out at home and spent a lot of time knitting. After Sgt Pepper, I wanted something that would work up quickly and be simple to knit with little finishing. This Noro cardigan fits the bill nicely. I'm up to the armholes already and will join for the yoke today at some point. Here's a progress picture with my notes, which are pretty standard for when I'm figuring out a sweater for myself: crappy sketch, lots of math, a couple of coherent statements about casting on and decreases.
I'm heading out to run some errands, but I'm going to try to take some pictures of completed projects for the galleries while the sun is still out. I should have some up by tomorrow.
I decided to experiment with the Noro sweater today and see if I could save the sleeves. I like how they fit and it would save that much time if I didn't have to do them over. I've never had a reason before to cut a piece off of my knitting, but the structure certainly lends itself to snipping a stitch and unpicking a row.
Really easy. I think it took me about ten minutes to do both of them.
I need to add about 2" in length to each of them but, Christ, that's almost a third of the sweater that I won't need to redo. I win! I really like the look of the crocheted edge and I'm thinking about doing that on the rest of the sweater too, instead of hems.
Last night I felt like doing some baking. I've been meaning to try out Nigella Lawson's Burnt-Butter Brown-Sugar Cupcakes for a while--the recipe is from How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Let me preface by saying that I adore Nigella. I love her enthusiasim about everything she makes and the fact that everything is her favorite and her very practical approach to everything from ingrediants and time management to a balanced diet. To this point, anything I've made from one of her recipes has been a raging success. Her Chocolate Chestnut Cake is the stuff ballads are written about. So I had very high expectations for these cupcakes, despite not being mad for cupcakes normally, because they're Nigella and they're basically just butter and sugar. She writes, "It's difficult to explain the wonderful resonant taste that burnt butter has, but think of it as a kind of mouth-filling nuttiness." See? Wouldn't you be intrigued too? And they're certainly good, but not great. I wouldn't NOT recommend them, but I'm not chasing people down in the street to share my joy either.
You start melting 1/2 c. plus 2 T unsalted butter and cooking it until it turns brown. She says to strain it, "as it will have made a sediment." This is a shocking understatement.
Sorry for the blurry picture, but I was taking it with one hand and apparently trembling with surprise at the weird grit that CAME OUT OF MY BUTTER. It felt like coffee grinds. You can see the color of the burnt butter in the bowl underneath.
You let the melted butter cool until it's solid, which takes for-freaking-EVER, BTW, and then beat in 3 T sugar, 5 T brown sugar, 2 eggs, 3/4 c flour (she recommends the self-rising cake variety, but I only had unbleached regular and just used that), 1 t vanilla, 1 t baking powder (which is why I didn't sweat it about the self-rising flour) and 2-3 T milk. Bake at 400* in a 12-cup muffin pan for 15-20 minutes.
For the icing, you burn another 1/2 c plus 2 T unsalted butter, beat in about a cup of confectioner's sugar and 1 t vanilla, then alternate adding milk and more sugar until you're happy with the consistency. I like my frosting on the soft side. If you touch it, it should come off on your fingers. At the very least, you should leave a mark. I feel very strongly about this. [ahem, Magnolia]
The frosting is really good. I would definitely make it again, maybe with a splash of maple syrup instead of the vanilla. I think it would be great on some kind of walnut cake or spice cake. I didn't think the burnt butter added much to the cupcakes themselves, though I'm certainly willing to consider that I didn't burn it enough, the flour substitution wrecked everything, etc.
Many years ago, when I was living on a mostly deflated air mattress in my friend Karen's dining room in Washington, DC, I bought quite a lot of some really gorgeous Noro yarn at some schmance yarn shop in the District. I don't know if the yarn's still around--it was called Sarubia and is 60% mohair/40% silk. I used it to knit the cover sweater from the then-current VK, Fall 1998.
I loved that sweater and wore it for a long time. I wasn't an experienced enough knitter then to realize that the directions were just NUTS. The front and back were knitted on the bias with cabling on both sides, which is fine and all, but you ended up with wildly torqued parallelogramish pieces that you were supposed to block into normal rectangles before sewing up. With 100% wool, it would have been weird but doable. With my mohair/silk yarn, I can only imagine that my naivete protected me because I shouldn't have ended up with as good-looking a sweater as I did.
A year or so ago, I realized that all of the seams were coming apart. This was after more than five years of regular cool-weather wear. I did some repair work, but it was a losing cause. By that point, I had enough knitting under my belt to realize how insane the whole enterprise was: the wrong yarn to execute a thoroughly questionable idea. So I took the whole sweater apart and stowed the extremely gorgeous yarn.
This fall, I used it to knit a top-down v-neck pullover with some extreme waist shaping and a lovely flared lower edge that hit me mid-thigh. Unfortunately, I screwed something up and it was waaay too big at the widest part of the yoke and very, very fitted in the waist. It bloused out above the bust, looked ridiculous and I would have been miserable every time I wore it. I started ripping it out again and lost heart halfway into it. It's been stashed in a basket for the last couple of months and I've been pointedly ignoring it. I'm pretty sure that the integrity of the yarn will be compromised if I don't leave it alone after I knit it into another sweater, so I really need to get it right this time. Here's the doomed unripped part:
See how pretty?
I'm at the tail end of a major project to be revealed later this week. I just have miles of icord to knit and some extremely tedious sewing to go before it's done. I'm thinking about my next front-burner project and I'm pretty sure I want to turn this yarn into a nice spring cardigan. Hip-length, slightly fitted, with hemmed edges and a crocheted button band. I have some gorgeous, antique shell buttons that will look perfect with it. Maybe a cable on each front. Or a lace panel? I was at Target today and spied some great skirts and tanks in my favorite sludgy lavenders, plums and greys--the perfect foil for this cardigan of my dreams. Now I just need to unravel all the yarn and knit the damn thing.
