I had a fairly momentous birthday this month, which led to these wonderful sights:
Flowers (delivered!), a giant pile of packages at the breakfast table, scrambled eggs for breakfast, and, on the left, a knitting-themed card and the latest installment in the series of book look-alike gifts from an enthusiastic user of the Royal Mail. Yes, folks, that is a box of hazelnut Bacio chocolates in a tin that looks like an early 20th-century Italian novel! Happy Birthday to me!
For those readers of this blog who also knit (that is, a fairly large proportion of the total, I suspect), I thought I’d drop by the blog today and show off my latest creation: a sweater I’m calling my Jefferson Henley pullover. This sweater is a very greatly modified version of the Topeka Henley pattern by Kate Gagnon Osborne. I’m calling it my Jefferson Henley because I made it out of yarn I bought in Jefferson, Wisconsin, during my very first (but definitely not last!) visit to the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival. I’m so happy to have a knitted memento of that wonderland of yarn, sheep-shearing demonstrations, baked potatoes and bratwurst from the 4-H club and talkative sheep farmers (including the farmer from Iowa who started chatting to me in the line-up for lamb burgers and pulled out of his wallet a long string of photos of “his girls” and bid me admire the length and staple of their curly fleeces).
The details
Pattern: Topeka Henley, by Kate Gagnon Osborn
Yarn: Northport, by River’s Edge Fiber Arts This is a 3-ply 100% Merino yarn, which knits up very soft and springy. Another great thing about this yarn is that it is put up in giant skeins of 500 grams (over 700 meters), which is fabulous for sweater-knitting. Fewer ends to weave in!
Color: Mulberry. I bought two skeins and found that they were slightly different colors (I don’t believe I checked the dyelots). So one sleeve is obviously a different color than the other, but non-knitters have told me they don’t really notice unless they look hard! It’s a lovely color: here’s a close-up:
Pattern modifications
Size: I cast on for the 39.5 inch bust size, and eventually decreased down to the 35.75 inch bust size for the bust and raglan shaping. I knit the body section about 7 inches longer than the pattern called for: the original pattern is for a fairly cropped sweater, ending right at the waist, which I don’t find very flattering or practical. I wanted something that would keep my mid-section warm, and also look good with skinny jeans or skirts, sort of like a tunic.
Shaping: Because of the added length, I added increases at the bottom (to create what Kate Davies calls an “arse accommodator”, although she added her shaping in the center-back, whereas I added mine at the side seams). I then decreased back down to the stitch count for the waist called for in the 35.75 inch bust size. I knit the arms longer (I think) than the pattern called for.
Stitch pattern: Instead of garter-stitch welts and details, I used moss-stitch/seed stitch.
Edgings and buttonholes: I used an i-cord cast-on for the body and sleeves, and then cast-off using an i-cord cast-off at the neck. I love love love the effect of the i-cord cast-on on the sleeves; it creates a nice “bubble” of fabric at the wrists:
I did not create any buttonholes at the neck when I was knitting the main body pieces. First of all, I found it fairly confusing to keep track of the raglan shaping in the first place (it didn’t help that I knit much of this section during Christmas holidays at busy family events!), so I didn’t want to add another set of numbers to keep track of in order to do the buttonholes. Secondly, I find that no matter how careful I am, I make quite untidy buttonholes, so I wanted to try something new. After I had completed all other parts of the sweater, I took out my buttons and placed them evenly along the Henley neck – I ended up using seven buttons instead of the eight called for in the pattern. Seven looked nicely spaced, and since I only had eight of these buttons in total, I wanted to keep a spare. It will be fairly tough to find a matching replacement as they were a gift from a family member’s visit to New Zealand! Once I had established the spacing, I used a measuring tape and some scrap yarn threaded on a darning needle to mark the rows where the buttonholes should be. I just passed the scrap yarn through the edge of the row in question, cut off a short length of it, and tied the two ends in a knot.
I then used applied i-cord along both sides of the Henley neck. Whereas the i-cord along the neck is three stitches wide, the buttonbands and buttonhole edging are five stitches wide, which I thought looked sturdier and more pleasing. If you have not made i-cord buttonbands like this before, I very highly recommend it! It is so neat and tidy, and it is lovely not to have to worry about making buttonholes as you are zooming through your decreases at the end of a bottom-up seamless sweater. I will definitely be making buttonholes like this again!
Other changes: This sweater has armpit gussets, which were not a feature of the original pattern. This was the result of a SNAFU when I was putting the sleeves together with the body. For some reason, no matter how many times I did this, I ended up with much looser stitches and gaping yarn loops at either side of the sleeve joins, and I was getting pretty fed up. So I cast on eight stitches on either side of the join, using the slack in the strange loops of yarn I had there in order to make the stitches and tighten everything up again. This worked extremely well, but then I was left with many more stitches at the underarms than specified in the pattern, and the extra cast-on stitches made a sort of ‘H’ shape, with the original armpit stitches as the crossbar. Instead of just grafting them all together, I waited until everything else was done, and then picked up all of the underarm stitches in a big circle, knitted four rows to create a small triangle or pouch under each armpit for a gusset, and then grafted the stitches. Now that I have made a sweater with accidental armpit gussets, I believe I will try one with intentional gussets. They certainly make the sweater more comfortable, especially as I knitted the sleeves and bust to have very little ease. Some of the sweaters in Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys and Arans have gussets, and I would be interested to try again with the idea.
Overall, I am very pleased with this sweater, but ambivalent about the original pattern. I feel like the look of my sweater is quite different from the original, and more flattering to me (at least I think so!). I found the layout of this pattern to be non-intuitive, and I had to make many notes on my copy in order to keep my math straight. Towards the end of the knitting, I essentially stopped following the pattern, and eyeballed the final stages, using what I had learned from knitting another raglan sweater based on the instructions in Knitting Without Tears. So, if you are a beginning knitter, I would not recommend this as a starter pattern. But if you are more experienced, it could be worth a look – I had never thought of knitting a sweater with this neckline until I saw this pattern, and now I realize that it is a very practical and flattering style, as you can undo some of the buttons if you are getting warm (or if you are wearing a nice necklace you want to show off!) or leave them buttoned.
Next up on my knitting list is an Antler Hat (free pattern). I’d like to pretend that by the time it is finished, the recipient might not have a need for it anymore this season, but alas, we are supposed to get more snow this week! It is beautiful though:
(and for more things that look like books, but aren’t, go here.)
Wild Rice – Photo by Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources on Flick (Creative Commons License)
One of my Christmas presents this year was The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook by Deb Perelman, author the blog of the same name . I was pretty excited to get this book even before I had a chance to take an in-depth look at it; I have already made several recipes from the blog, and I have found them to be both delicious and well-tested. Nothing I have made from Smitten Kitchen has failed or been even vaguely disappointing. (Tip: Try the pumpkin muffins)
I’m happy to report that this recipe was no exception! I’m afraid to say that I have misplaced my iPod, which is my only camera (don’t panic! I think I just left it at work!). So this post won’t have any pictures of the cheesy goodness. But this recipe was fabulous! For those of you who don’t already have the cookbook (and you should! Valentine’s Day gift? February splurge?), the gratin is pretty simple. You prepare cooked wild rice, steamed kale, and caramelized onions, and mix them altogether with swiss cheese, add more cheese on top, add breadcrumbs, and bake.
Now, I am sure that would be wonderful just like that. But I am constitutionally unable to make dinner recipes without modifying them – baking recipes, I can follow to the letter, but when cooking dinner I always have the urge to change things a little, often so that I can use up stuff in my cupboards. On that note, I cut down on the amount of wild rice, and cooked up some basmati rice to supplement it. This was for reasons of economy (wild rice is expensive, even though I do live near one of the largest historical centers of wild rice harvesting), and because I thought that a little basmati would make for a nice hearty texture. I also added some frozen chopped carrots, for a little color, and added a teaspoon of a herb blend in my cupboard called Tuscan Salt, from Les Soeurs en Vrac in Montreal. The whole thing looked a little dry when I put it into the casserole, so I slurped in some milk around the edges of the baking dish; I won’t deny that I was also hoping to get a bit of creaminess, slightly evocative of canned mushroom soup. Finally, I added a few crushed Ritz cracker crumbs on top, just because I could – I always read recipes for casseroles that have Ritz crumbs on them, but we hardly ever have Ritz crackers in the house. Right now, we do, as the result of overbuying for a Christmas party.
My husband saw the casserole before I put it in the oven and he said “It’s a . . . HOTDISH!” (the jury’s still out, though, on whether this is the correct Wisconsin term . I added to the feeling of Midwester midwinter cosiness by serving the casserole with some braised red cabbage that I had made earlier and frozen (a note on the linked recipe: do not use balsamic vinegar as called for: use red wine vinegar, or cider vinegar or even white vinegar). I then reheated the frozen cooked red cabbage with a splash of gin, reasoning that my dad often throws in a few juniper berries when making red cabbage and/or roat pork. The mixture of casserole and red cabbage was a winner, and we’ll definitely be eating this again.
The casserole has a great texture, with some chewiness from the wild rice and softness from the onions. The flavor is slightly reminiscent of stuffing. But the real genius of this recipe is the decision to use Swiss cheese instead of a more strongly flavored cheese. It means that a mild cheesy flavor permeates the whole dish, without overpowering it. It doesn’t hurt that we can get very good Swiss Cheese, living, as we do, near the Swiss Cheese Capital of the USA. As an added advantage, this recipe makes perfect use of local foods available in winter, without being a variation on “same old, same old” dishes. I’m now inspired to mix everything with Swiss cheese and wild rice, and call it dinner!
Bonus for lovers of textiles, printing, quilting, design, competitions, or any combination thereof
My friend Kate Austin is one of ten finalists in the Repeat(ed) fabric design competition on the Printed Bolt. I’m so excited for her! Check it out!
(and psssst, Kate also sells her fabric designs through Spoonflower. I love love love her Park Toronto design; it makes me homesick for my city).
In addition to the ridiculous piles of yarn and sweaters populating my house, I also have a number of 100% wool blankets, which are definitely keeping me warm these days. In particular, I have a queen-sized Hudson Bay Point Blanket that we received as a wedding gift from my parents – it was tucked inside a cedar blanket chest built by my Dad. Best gift ever! We love this blanket – it keeps us toasty and it’s so heavy that it prevents the sheets and duvet underneath it from shifting during the night as well. But I was getting worried (to the extent that one should be worried about textile cleaning), that I would either a) have to pay an arm and leg every couple of years to get it dry-cleaned or b) have an increasingly grimy and smelly blanket on our bed. That’s why I was intrigued the other day to read this article in Mother Earth News on cleaning wool with snow. Who knew? You can clean wool blankets and rugs by scrubbing them with cold snow!
It’s been quite cold in Madison this past week, and last Thursday it was around 5F/-15 C. You need cold weather to make this cleaning method work, otherwise the snow simply melts on contact and makes the blanket too wet. So I decided to give this a try. I took the blanket outside and hung it on our clothesline for an hour or so, to pre-chill it. I then spread it on the snow (about 6 inches) covering the ground:
The article linked above simply said to walk all over the blanket, in order to smush the snow into the fabric. This didn’t seem like a good idea considering that I was wearing heavy, soiled boots! So I got on my hands and knees and crawled all over the blanket, then flipped it over and did the same thing on the other side. I took a break at one point to admire the scenic view:
and then shook it out as best I could (which wasn’t very well – that thing is heavy), and took it upstairs to hang it over the banister to dry out.
(OK, the real story is that between crawling all over it in the back yard and bringing it inside, I discovered that I had locked myself out of my house, in 5 degree F weather, wearing jeans and my Bucky the Badger sweatshirt, no mittens, no phone, no wallet. Thank goodness for neighbourhood stores that let you use their phone, and for the fact that our property manager lives around the corner. Phew!)
So, after I made an idiot of myself crawling all over a blanket in the snow, did it work? YES! Yes it did! The blanket smells much better, and I do believe it looks brighter as well. So I think this will become a yearly activity, and I’m happy to be able to continue using my beloved Hudson Bay blanket every day without worrying about it becoming too stinky. A good discovery!
(Finally, for those who are expecting that a blog called “Bronwen Reads” should include some mention of, well, reading, never fear! In between all of the textile-washing this weekend I had the chance to place lots of holds on library books – I’m particularly looking forward to getting my hands on Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford.)
I’m so happy to be back in Madison after about a month in Toronto. I couldn’t be happier to be lying here on my own green couch, listening to the laundry in the machine, and mulling over what to cook for dinner in my own kitchen. I’ve signed up for an account with Mealboard, a website and app that allows you to load recipes, make grocery lists and plan your meals based on the contents of your pantry. It was a bit of work to set it all up – I entered most of the information onto my iPod touch during a long train ride – but I’m interested to see how it will all work. I entered several recipes from one of my favourite Christmas presents: the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook! First up on the testing roster is the recipe for Wild Rice Gratin with Kale and Gruyere, which should help me to make a small dent in the mass of frozen kale in our freezer. I’m planning on writing several posts/recipe reviews related to this cookbook: in short, I adore it.
We have a gigantic amount of canned and frozen vegetables in stock right now, as the result of my September mania for preserving the tomato in all its forms, and because of our membership in the Harmony Valley Farm CSA (community supported agriculture). Before leaving for Toronto, I went through our fridge and froze as much as I could, including about ten pounds of carrots and several pounds of parsnips and turnips. I even sliced, blanched and froze two bags of sweet potatoes, in the hopes of making my own pre-frozen sweet potato fries. I think you can just freeze sweet potatoes without blanching, but a little online research suggested that they would be a better texture if I blanched them first. I’ll report back on this experiment! I love sweet potato fries and it seemed like a shame to let the sweet potatoes go to waste.
One of the vegetables that I froze from our CSA box was this beautiful Scarlet Turnip
In addition to the pile of laundry and the storehouse of vegetables that greeted me at home, I was also confronted by a pile of overdue library books. I think I heard somewhere that librarians pay more in overdue fines than members of the general public, not less. This doesn’t surprise me in the least: not only do librarians tend to be heavy users of libraries, they also, shall we say, tend to be a little scatterbrained and distracted. Currently overdue, or very close to being due on my account are:
More Baths, Less Talking, by Nick Hornby (not actually an ode to bathing, unless you count reading in the bath – this is a book of book reviews)
The Mormon People, by Mathew Burton Bowman (a history of Mormonism, which was very detailed but very unwilling to engage with controversial topics – not surprising considering that the author is himself a Mormon and the book was written with co-operation from church authorities, but it definitely made the book less interesting)
and The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You (I won’t try and explain what this great book is about, just direct you to Pariser’s excellent Ted Talk.)
Greetings, long-neglected blog readers! I’m glad to be back posting here, and I’ve got lots of ideas for things to write about this year! And. most importantly – I finally own a functioning camera again, in the form of a new iPod touch, which takes surprisingly good photos, and, perhaps more importantly, is connected to this amazing thing called the Internet, meaning I don’t have to search through my desk drawer for my camera cord every time I want to overshare post something interesting.
Despite the lack of blog activity, the fall was not without reading activity, or cooking activity, or knitting activity, about which I plan to write more in the coming weeks. I’m toying with the idea of releasing a few knitting patterns, in fact, so watch this space. But the most exciting plan around these parts is definitely the fact that my husband and I are planning to spend this coming fall in Scotland, a wonderland for both book lovers (and book sculptors) and, of course, lovers of yarn and history. Sounded like a perfect plan to me just as soon as we came up with it. But I gained further confirmation that I was meant to be in Scotland when my twin sister notified me that in Shetland, they have started dressing their small ponies in intricately patterned cardigans. If one of these ponies had a book stashed behind its wind-beaten grassy hillock, we would be soulmates.
