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a birthday beret!

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This is my friend Carol. If you’ve been to a Vogue Knitting LIVE, and been in the Marketplace, you might have seen her dash past you as she worked the event. And I mean dash—this girl does not move slowly. She’s tireless at everything she does, from running marathons to drinking coffee to just plain talking. And she just raced to age 30.

Leading up to her birthday she was downright shameless. “Erin! I’m turning 30! Knit me something!” and “I love alll knitted things! You could knit me anything!” and even “Don’t you want to knit me something for my thirtieth?” I am certainly not immune to that kind of enthusiasm—I’m not made of stone, people. (Can we talk for a moment about her new dog, Ritz, and how adorable he is? Never did you see a more chill, laid-back dog with a more hyperactive owner. He comes to the office from time to time, and of course celebrated her birthday with her. His sweater, by the way, was store-bought.)

So after I finished the Bulky Topper, I knit her this hat, from Vogue Knitting’s Fall 2009 issue. (It’s actually the cover hat, modeled by a former America’s Next Top Model contestant!) The yarn is the remaining Sanguine Gryphon Skinny Bugga that I used in my Buckwheat, and though I think I had a different gauge than the pattern, it fits just right. It was a speedy knit and easy to memorize. In fact, it was my plane knitting because I had all my WIP patterns only on my phone, digital, so I knit this at takeoff and landing. I blocked it over a plate on the radiator and it softened so nicely to a great drape.

Let me tell you, when I gave it to her? She literally jumped up and down and shrieked with joy, put it on, told everyone how awesome she looks in a hat (before she’d seen herself in it), and ran around the office to show it off. The next day she planned her outfit specifically to coordinate with it and wore it for the entire day, too. Honestly, guys, never was a handknit item more well received. I better start planning for her 31st!

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tenderloin sandwiches

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I don’t quite know how it happened—I’m a good mid-Atlantic girl!—but I find myself these days literally surrounded by Midwesterners. They have a particular brand of earnestness, niceness, and . . . odd childhood food favorites. When we are all together they’re always reminiscing about some Cool Whip–laden dessert or cheesy baked dish. I personally don’t recall ever eating these things growing up. Crab cake, anyone?

One thing they’re forever talking about that you just can not find outside that expansive section of our country is the tenderloin sandwich. They clamor to tell me how it should be eaten: on crappy hamburger buns / with little to no condiments / where the meat is so big it exceeds the bun by inches all around / with something like waffle fries from a bag. Sounds . . . delicious? Waffle fries would be a guarantee, at the very least.

They found recipes, settled on one, and decided we would have a whole Midwestern night. Somehow, however, I ended up in the kitchen doing all the cooking. I pointed out that I was the only non-Midwesterner. Holly said “We know how to eat them, not how to cook them.” It fell to me to butterfly pork tenderloin while Holly, Jason, and Chris pounded them flat and then breaded them up. I fried them all to what looked to me to be crispy perfection. (And let’s be honest. The idea that I might relinquish control of my kitchen was a folly.)

We piled the giant tenderloins on Wonder Bread hamburger buns (I added lettuce and mayo) and dug in, with waffle fries and supermarket cole slaw on the side. And you know what? It was truly delicious, in the way only an all-white meal can be.

A few lessons learned, should you want to make this yourself:

  • Do not be afraid to pound this out to absurdly large diameter. It shrinks up a LOT once it’s in the oil (think bacon’s shrinkage). Go even bigger than you think, if you want it to hang over the bread like it did in your childhood.
  • Keep the oil very hot. Even in my cast iron pan, it cooled if there were two pieces in the pan, leading to longer frying times.
  • Lettuce adds a much needed brightness and crunch. I conveniently had iceberg in the fridge; I don’t think any other kind would be appropriate.
  • Wonder Bread hamburger buns are really perfectly soft.

Pork Tenderloin Sandwiches
 Cut a whole boneless pork loin into 1-inch pieces. Butterfly these pieces and then pound between two pieces of plastic wrap (as you can see, I bought my Saran Wrap around Christmas, so it’s red!) til 1/8 inch thick. We use old empty heavy salsa jars to pound, but a meat tenderizer would probably work best!

Dip the pounded meat into water, then dredge in a mixture made up of 2 parts flour to 1 part cornmeal, seasoned generously with salt and plenty of pepper.

Heat a half-inch of vegetable oil (I used canola) to super hot in a cast-iron pan. (I didn’t put a thermometer in to test the temp, just tested the oil by tossing loose flour into the oil. When it sizzled like crazy, it was ready.) Set the breaded tenderloin in and fry til golden brown, about 3 minutes a side.

Serve on crappy buns with desired condiments (DO NOT BE AFRAID OF CONDIMENTS, MIDWESTERNERS).

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meet Bob and his brother, Bob

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My three quilting bees are pretty much all wrapped up now (I think one person still has to take her turn!) and I’m finally (finally!) finishing up all my blocks. I started out gangbusters on bee blocks, completing them within the allotted month every time, but then the job and life got a lot more busy, the apartment was rearranged, and I slacked off something awful.

Luckily, my bee partners have been pretty forgiving.

My most recent bee blocks finished were for Chawne, a quilter/knitter/crocheter extraordinaire. This is the second time I’ve made blocks for Chawne, actually. I should blog the others! (I’ll get to it.) This bee we called the “Twitter Bee Solid Six” because we were all keen on making all-solid quilts after our first bee together, the Twitter Bee. Only six of us wanted to participate in this offshoot, so we decided to make it a six-month-long one, giving 2 months for each person.

Bob 1

Chawne asked us to make block-size versions of her quilt pattern, named Bob. (Each of these blocks is 16.5 inches square.) She designed this and wrote it up for Fat Quarterly, but shared the details with us. The smallest squares have a finished measurement of 1-inch square, so precision is key. It was a lot of careful cutting and sewing, and I did a pretty good job I think! Some of those seams don’t line up exactly, I know, but a lot of them do!

Bob 2

The fabrics are shot cottons; Chawne provided something like 30 different colors to each of us! I wonder how she’s going to combine them all…

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bulky topper!

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Nothing beats a knit that comes together fast, wears super easily, and uses up a good deal of yarn from your stash! The Bulky Topper by Mari Lynn Patrick was one of my favorites from the Fall 2011 issue of Vogue Knitting, and Lauren suggested in January that we do a little mini knit-along together. Circumstances conspired to give me long stretches of knitting time in February, so I finished up my new most favorite knit in one quick week!

When I visited Lauren in Chicago for a weekend, she excitedly pulled out her yarn to show me, and I’ll admit, I was downright jealous. Hers is the most lovely of grays, a color that I’ve been obsessed with lately. But I wanted to use something from my stash, and I have no gray in a sweater quantity. I had this dark brown I bought at Rhinebeck years ago, when I was in a long-lived brown phase. I harumphed but plunged ahead on a gauge swatch, not even sure if the yarn would work. But as I worked it, the brown started to get into my brain: I love brown! Why had I forsaken it for gray! But damn, did I need a pair of brown boots to wear with this sweater.

Before I’d even finished a single piece (it’s knit flat and seamed—and that’s important to the design, actually), I was out shopping for boots. I found the pair in the photos, and I’m in love! They’re the perfect color, comfortable right out of the store, and exactly what I wanted. They’re from some Italian brand I’d never heard of (I bought them at Century 21). We ran around on the beach and they held up just fine; I splashed around puddles in them recently and nothing calamitous happened. But wait, this is a post about knitting a sweater, not about a pair of boots? Okay then.

So yeah, my knitting of this sweater is actually fraught with some drama. It has been years—literally YEARS—since I knit something flat. It’s also been I-don’t-know-how-long since I knit something that was in reverse stockinette. And you know what? I row out. If you’re not familiar with the term, rowing out is used to describe an effect that comes about if your purls and knits aren’t quite the same height. I must be a touch looser when I purl, so I get slight troughs that are visible on the reverse stockinette side (they’re not visible on the stockinette side for me). I fretted and faffed and ultimately started working my knits on 10.5s and my purls on 10s and it evened out significantly. I even tried different hand positions (going back to knitting English; purling combo) and nothing else helped. In the end, I only worked this two-needle trick for the front and the sleeves; the back was done all on size 10s. Honestly, there’s still evidence of the rowing out even having used that trick. Apparently I need some remedial knitting lessons!

The other reason I raced to get this knit in a week was that I was on a weekend away with my best knitting peeps, and one of them is photographer Caro Sheridan, who I knew could get some awesome photos of me in the sweater. Of course, I finished the damn thing on a beautiful sunny Saturday with blue skies (the same day that I took that picture of Pam in her dragon mitts). But I conveniently finished it that NIGHT. And the next day? A Nor’easter came charging through. It was cold and wet and felt a bit like a hurricane at times. So we hunkered down in the house and there was no photo shoot. The next day, when it was windy as all heck, sand was stinging its way down the shore, and the sea was more churn than water, we dashed down to the water’s edge and had us a photo shoot. Her hands were red and our faces were freezing within moments, but I gotta tell ya: My torso? Not cold at all. Bulky Topper FTW!

Here’s video evidence of the windiness! I say “It’s really windy out here!” And then I ask her if she can even hear me, suspecting that you can’t hear anything over the wind hitting the microphone. And I was right!

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rustling leaves beret

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I’m late to the beret game. It was never “my” style of hat, and though I admired people’s work from afar, it just wasn’t my thing. But then I decided to request one when Nova was knitting for me, to get me to step outside my comfort zone a touch. I loved it, so then I started knitting them myself. I had no idea how fun and fast they are!

This pattern first caught my eye when I saw Sara’s finished example. I saw amoebas in the pattern more than leaves, and I loved their elongated shape! We have that book at the office, so I snagged a skein of Alisha Goes Around from my stash in a particularly fantastic shade of green and cast on while watching Annie with friends. (I recommend this if you grew up with Annie, because singing along is loads of fun.)

I finished it off less than a week later, and I wasn’t even knitting it that much. Just a few minutes at lunch, a few while watching TV. I did make one error, in that I did not do the brim in a smaller size needle, so it just sort of . . . hangs on my head. However, it is perfectly stable (the yarn has some nice weight) and is so easy for me to wear!

Photos are © Caro Sheridan, again! I love how frequently I see her lately, because the timing has been perfect for getting her to take my FO shots! This time we were in Cambridge having lunch with friends; I’m in town for a business conference. I know I’m capable of taking my own pictures, but why bother when I can enlist a professional? This was spur-of-the-moment, I was rather unkempt, but she made me look amazing. (She was also with me for the Annie singalong, so it’s only fitting!)