Applemania

Along with all the other things to love about fall- there's apple season. I'm a big fan of the humble apple. It's tasty fixed so many ways. And this year I have every reason not to restrain myself, because my sister and her husband have given me a bushel and a half of apples from their trees.


So, we've had applesauce. I make it in bulk using a food mill. I'm not generally a fan of single-use gadgets, but this one is so darned useful if you like applesauce, that it's worth every minute of cabinet space for the 11 months of the year it waits for its true purpose. So all I do is wash and quarter the apples and remove stems. (These being somewhat feral apples, I also remove unwanted wildlife. Future dinner guests will be happy to know that part.) Fill a big pot.


Add water and boil to mush. Then run the whole mess through the food mill (sort of a pan with a sieve in the bottom and a crank/paddle arrangement that presses the mush through the sieve. Then add sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg (and sometimes ginger) to taste. Yum.


And it freezes very well, without the funny taste (or all the work) of canning. I either pour the sauce into a bag inside a container (seal the bag, freeze, then you can pop the frozen sauce-in-a-bag out of the container and reclaim the container for use). Or I pour them into my collection of single-serving yogurt cups. The cups are easy to decant into a bowl, and five minutes in the microwave gives me hot applesauce for breakfast on a cold winter morning.

In addition to the industrial production of applesauce, we've had pie.


Apple crisp.


And applesauce spice cake (my grandmother's recipe).


There's only one thing that scares me a little. I'm only halfway through the first box of apples.

Gratifying

It's rare that a knit grabs me so hard that I drop everything else to work on it. But the colorwork pullover was just such a knit. Five weeks from cast on to blocking has got to be a new record for me.


Woats got bored with helping knit after a while, but the yarn itself hasn't lost it's appeal:


Of course with the advent of cooler weather, I suspect that I could practice the tuba and she still wouldn't get off my lap.

I wasn't entirely confident about how the yoke was coming out, but blocking helped a lot. Blocking also let me stretch the sweater a critical couple of inches that I think will improve the fit. Enormously fun, I'm clearly going to have to do more colorwork. I will say, the two-handed technique was way, way easier than my one previous attempt (when I swapped yarn back and forth in my dominant hand and just about went cuckoo). And it's a huge advantage to learning two-handed technique if you start out being a right-handed Continental knitter. I'm not especially fast knitting English style, but I didn't have to be- being able to use both hands at all made it all go much more smoothly.

So then to celebrate finishing, I shopped. (That thud you hear is my mother fainting dead away in shock.) No, really. For more yarn. The colorwork sweater used up most of eight balls of merino I had on hand, and that was the last yarn I had in any quantity. I've got a bunch of odd balls of acrylic, a few balls of sock yarn, some scraps from other projects and that's about it. And, my LYS was having a sale. Hence:

Some nice plain superwash wool for a baby blanket. And I am officially saying that anyone of my acquaintance who tells me they're expecting? Should consider delaying the birth of the child. I've got a schedule to think about.


Then we have some lovely bamboo-soy blend sock yarn, part of my quest to try different yarns and fibers. I've been extremely curious about how the bamboo will wear since I found out it was a cool-weather wicking fiber. These should make a good pair of go-anywhere types of socks.


And last but not least, more bamboo- this I want to use for a summer top. I'm starting to notice some attrition from my last big summer clothes shopping trip-(well, it was in 1992). I've only had to take the radical step of demoting a few things to the ragbag, but there are bunch of other clothes I've had to reluctantly banish from the work wardrobe. (There's business casual, and then just casual...)


And I'm resisting the urge to cast on all of these. Priorities. Plans. I've got socks to knit, and one or two things for the holidays. And in the meantime, I need to go pull out a few hundred pattern books and magazines that I can reject contemptuously before knitting the baby blanket to an improvised design. Hey, why mess with success? I finished the sweater!

Seasonal Finery

I'd hold onto the daylight with teeth and fingernails if I could, but even with the shortening of the days, I've always loved fall. The cool air, the brilliant colors. On a sunny day the trees have their party clothes on, and on a cloudy one they practically glow.

Weekend before last, I went hiking on Mt. Monadnock in southern NH. The leaves were still turning:


From the top of the mountain, you can see the splashes of color running down the side of the ridge:


Then last weekend, I was out in western Massachusetts, and shot some nice foliage around the college town of Amherst:



If you'd like more foliage, there are more pictures of Monadnock and of Amherst. Leaf season is all too short, so I'm delighted that I've been able to get out and enjoy it this year.

And for the last of my recent travels with knitting, I battled traffic on Wednesday to get down to Cambridge and hear Stephanie Pearl-McPhee speak. I picked up her new book at the reading, but then ducked around the corner to check out Porter Square Books, the lovely bookstore that was sponsoring the event. And found something else I'd been looking for:


I'm really hoping for a long lovely autumn, but when the nasty weather arrives, I'll be ready for it. This weekend? I may need to buy yarn.