Old photos, new random stuff

NH foliage
Originally uploaded by knitswithasilentk

This photo is from our New England Foliage trip, fall of 2006, during The Sweetie's sabbatical. We forgot to bring a real camera, so I took this with my cell phone. I just recently bothered to get all the photos off my cell phone and into Flickr, where they can live in perpetuity.

I have been working on seaming the second bootie - now confirmed to be smaller than #1, and probably close to the intended size. After that, the ankle sock portion to knit. This time, I took care to slip the first stitch of every row and knit the last stitch of every row through the back loop to assist in seaming. I had to add a couple of selvedge stitches to the ribbed cuff to make it work out, but it turned out nicely, I think.

Now I just have to decide whether to keep #1 around as an artifact of gauge lying, or whether to rip it out (potentially salvaging the ankle sock portion?) and re-knit it tighter.

I recently finished a book, A Year without "Made In China". It was a really easy and fun read - not heavy-handed. It chronicles an American family's attempt to not buy items made in China for a year - this family had 2 small children, too! They weren't always perfect - sometimes they accidentally bought stuff made in China (who knew that candy canes were made in China?). They had to decide about parts of items made in China, as well as whether certain areas such as Taiwan or Hong Kong counted. The author acknowledges that she has nothing against China as a country or its people; it was kind of an arbitrary choice to be more aware of where manufactured goods come from. It didn't have a whole lot in the way of fact-finding sidebars; it really was an account of their experiences. All in all, it was a thoughtful book and an entertaining read.

One interesting thing: even though they often spent more money on items to get them from some country other than China, they ended up spending less money overall, since they were prevented from buying junk that they could do without.