Python: Converting from ISO-8859-1/latin1 to UTF-8

I have this string that has been decoded from Quoted-printable to ISO-8859-1 with the email module. This gives me strings like "\xC4pple" which would correspond to "Äpple" (Apple in Swedish). However, I can't convert those strings to UTF-8.

>>> apple = "\xC4pple"
>>> apple
'\xc4pple'
>>> apple.encode("UTF-8")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc4 in position 0: ordinal not in     range(128)

What should I do?