Imperfect Knitting

I was upset to discover that the odd balls of cotton ease I am using for the cabled tank come from two different dye lots. I wondered if I should have ripped back and alternated the two dye lots for a few inches to blend them together. But, if it took me several inches to discover the slight color difference, then why bother ripping out 3 inches of work? Still, I pondered and stewed.

Serendipitously, I took Iris to the bookstore and saw Dan Ho's latest book. (Who is Dan Ho? Read the Passionate Imperfectionist entry at the bottom of Stuff.) I dimly recall a Kawabata novel in which two characters obsess over a tiny flaw in a raku teacup and the novel did not have a happy ending. I decided to embrace imperfection. The two dye lots have personal significance to me; seeing them makes me smile. Therefore, I will act like I meant it all along and mix the two dye lots willy-nilly.

Years ago, I made the chic little French sweater called "Kate" from a Phildar pattern. It came out a little bit too tight because I switched from 4.5 to 4.25 mm diameter needles after swatching, but forgot to add a few extra stitches to compensate. The sweater fit a lanky 12-year-old very well. Her mother said it was not appropriate for her daughter to accept a hand knit sweater from someone she had just met. She told me to put the sweater away until it fits Iris.

Kate is the more muted of the two shades of blue. You can read more about Kate at Fiber Musings. (In blog prehistory, I used to post my knitting notes on my sister's blog.) Rock Chick co-hosted a Kate-along. However, the Kate-along blog appears to have been deleted. I linked instead to Rock Chick's announcement about the KAL and her sweater.

The brighter of the two blues are left over from one of Iris' outgrown sweaters. I took a picture before giving it away to her younger cousin. However, you can see an adorable picture of Iris in this sweater along with my notes in my sister's blog archive.

Iris discovered surfing the web quite early. I was browsing the Berroco free patterns website for toddler sweaters when Iris fell in love with Cutie Patootie (pattern link). I am not sure which she loved more, the sweater or saying Cutie Patootie. She said she wanted the sweater just like that; only she wanted it to be blue, white and gold. Iris was quite the impatient taskmaster and CP was finished in double time (for me).

We trekked down to the San Diego area for the third time in a single month. Of course, we went to JamRoc101 for the whole red snapper. Chef Garcia posed with the snapper for a photo op.

Then we kissed her grandparents, aunt and cousin goodbye and headed north. Last weekend, Iris was bereft that we missed the Oceanside Art Museum, arriving 15 minutes after closing. (OAM is the home of Visions, a fantastic biennial juried art quilt show.) We missed Visions, which closed in January 2007. We did see some interesting California contemporary sculptures at OAM.

We also enjoyed outdoor art.

We celebrated Memorial day by shopping at IKEA and hanging cabinets in the home office area. Mark stocked up on Swedish foods while I shopped. (His parents met while they were both living in Sweden; his family is fond of foods I won't touch, even though I am an adventurous eater.)

On the home from IKEA, we stopped at Men-Bei ramen house in the Mitsuwa Marketplace center (conveniently located midway between Honda and Toyota USA HQs) in Torrance. I find it slightly embarrassing (but a big relief) to go to restaurants with Iris now that she reads so much. She will read through meals rather than converse with us.

Fortunately, that is normal at Men-Bei. Iris is posing in front of one of three bookcases full of Japanese manga books. Patrons are welcome to help themselves to reading material while they are in the restaurant. In about 2/3 of the tables, patrons devour the manga with their ramen rather than speak to their companions. See?



Wow, we visited Jamaica, Sweden and Japan in one weekend, within 100 miles of our home. Globalization has a positive side.

Birthrates and Housework

I have alluded before to the connection between distribution of housework and but I was not aware until recently about a small study that showed exactly that. I pulled a few quotes from a BBC News summary about the study.

The researchers from Brown University studied 265 married couples in which both partners were employed.

The husbands and wives were asked to report how much time they and their spouses spent per week on nine common household tasks, such as cooking, shopping and cleaning.

...81% of couples in which the husband does at least half the housework will have a second child.

...when the woman did between 54% and 84% of the housework, the likelihood of the couple having a second child went down to 55%.

...more traditional couples, where the woman did more than 84% of the housework, frequently went on to have a second child.

She (Christine Northam, a counsellor for Relate) said some couples may decide it is better for one half to stay at home and take on all of the household tasks. "If one of them is taking complete responsibility for the housework it means the other one doesn't have that on top of everything else. "It may well indicate that one of them had decided to stay home and look after the family, in which case maybe for that couple having a family is more of a priority than working," she said.

Reading this, it looks like women who expected an egalitarian marriage but did not get one, are the ones most likely to stop after one child. It is the expectation versus the reality that causes low birthrates.

The one child family is the norm in many countries such as Italy and Australia. No wonder health and pension ministers from those nations have been trying to get men in their countries to do more housework. I wonder when American politicians are going to "get it".

I am also surprised by people who talk about falling birthrates as if that would be the answer to the huge influx of immigrants we have experienced in recent years. The reason we need so many immigrants is partly because American parents, particularly mothers, are so overworked.

Remember the quote from Sharon Lerner from the What do I tell her? post? She said that birthrates in the US would be as low as in Europe if it weren't for high-fertility recent immigrants. It is easier to build 20 foot fences around our borders than to take a hard look at home.

The anthology, Global Woman, may be somewhat uneven, but it contains some excellent, well-researched treatments of the global effects of "the care deficit" at home. When women do not get the help that they need nearby, they look farther for solutions. That is as true for the wife in a dual-career household in the USA as the single mother in Mexico who leaves her children behind with relatives to seek paid work "El Norte". Both women are doing what they must do for the survival of themselves and their children. Why do we know Zoe Baird's name but not her husband's?

Aside:
In the preface to the second edition of The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild wrote that the narrowing of the gap between percentage of housework performed by husbands and wives in dual-career couples is not because the men do more. It is because the wives have outsourced more of it. In fact, husbands are doing less now than in her initial study.

I would like to add that people work at different efficiencies. Just because a husband expends 30% of the household work hours in a home does not mean that he performs 30% of the work. ;-)

I also encountered this article about division of labor between the sexes in Turkey in the BBC News archives. Mark wonders why Europe prefers immigrants from Turkey over east Asia.

Baby Names Again

How could I blog about baby naming without linking to Martin Wattenberg's Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager? I can only blame a momentary memory lapse. The NameVoyager is one of the most beautiful and elegant pieces of graphic design I have ever seen. That's saying quite a great deal because I took the Edward Tufte class a few months ago.

The NameVoyager is a Java Applets that displays the frequency of use of the top 1000 baby names from 1880-2005, broken down by gender (2000 total).

The NameVoyager tracks names of babies born in the United States, as reported by the Social Security Administration (SSA). We have cleansed the raw SSA data and performed statistical transformations to allow meaningful historical comparisons.

Names are arranged alphabetically. Boys are in blues and grays. Girls are in pinks and gray. The thickness of the colors denote frequency of use. Put your mouse over an area and a box with the name and rank appears.

Type in a name (look at the blinking cursor at top left). As soon as you type in the first letter, the graph changes to show all names that start with those letters. I typed in "I" and saw that "I" names had drastically fallen out of favor between 1930 and 2000. In the early naughts, the popularity of "I" names exploded again.

Type in "IR" and see that Irene used to be much more popular than Iris, but not since the 1990s. Type in "Mad" and see the recent explosive popularity of Madison and Maddox!

I especially like this caution about statistics.

The graphs in the Baby Name Wizard book and web site show the frequency of use of different names. If one name stripe is twice as thick as another on the same screen, that means the name was twice as common.

You may have seen other graphs based on popularity rank. Be wary of any information source which does this--it's a fundamental misuse of data, and the graphs just aren't meaningful. For example, the name Joseph has risen from the 13th most popular name 50 years ago to #10 today...but the name is actually significantly less common today.

Anyway, don't delay. Visit this website now! You have time to kill and I don't have time to explain all the amazing features of this program.

Links:
The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager
Open House
See Martin Wattenberg's other Art and Science projects