DrainKikoLake

In May my spouse and I are going away together for a few days without the kids for the first time in a decade.

The tulip and daffodil leaves are emerging in our gardens and soon we will have flowers.

Our church is starting up again this week & I love choir.

French's ketchup is made from tomatoes grown in Leamington, ON. It was a huge deal when Heinz pulled out from their plant there & then French's bought it.

The username might be a clue here.

I wish my grocery stocked it. I buy Earth's Own oat milk though.

It's hard but even small efforts help. For me the hierarchy kinda goes like this:

• Canadian company
• Non-Canadian, non-US company
• US company franchised/operating in Canada
• US company operating in the US

I aim for number one, try to avoid number four, and the two inner ones are a little more loosey-goosey for me and will depend mostly on the individual product. There are some things we just don't produce here so... I just do what I can, where I can, and don't feel guilty if there's an American product I can't replace (ever/yet).

I use an app called ReadEra which I like very much. I use the free version but it looks like the premium version does what you're looking for: it can sync via Google drive and you can upload your own fonts. (Premium is a one-time $20 payment, not a subscription.)

https://readera.org/

I just spent $7 for a pound of Ontario greenhouse strawberries instead of $1.99 for a pound from California. Just as an example. My brothers and I keep texting each other Canadian products we've found to replace US options. We're far from alone.

What American media is downplaying is that this is about way more than tariffs. This is about a friendly neighbour suddenly deciding that it would like our stuff/land/people and making real threats about taking it. It's about a bully threatening our national sovereignty and everyone in his country either going along with it or throwing up their hands in despair. It's an incredible betrayal and Canadians are enraged.

(As an acquaintance of mine put it: do you know how hard you have to work to get Canada to boo your country? That's a real accomplishment, you guys.)

In terms of how things are going, here are some recent pieces from our national media:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/article-buy-canadian-movement-starts-to-take-a-sizable-bite-into-us-business/

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6679836

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/decline-travellers-driving-from-canada-u-s-february

Cozey.ca for things like couches and ottomans -- founded & made in Canada, and free Canada-wide shipping! We bought a couch from them earlier this year & it's fantastic. (It's all modular which makes it easy to get places like down the basement stairs, and very easy to assemble.)

How old is your sibling?

Making squares into a blanket is a great way to do it :) And the squares themselves can be very satisfying just because they go from casting on to finished so quickly. It's nice to have something that works up fast, especially if you've got bigger things also on the go.

Here's a close-up of part of the underside:

And you can see a little more detail here (the flowers are the centre parts of big squares for the border that I'm working on adding):

Well, I've made about a zillion baby blankets, so making a really big one didn't seem like too much of a step. Clothes, though, that's something I've yet to attempt!

Very nice! Is that bernat blanket yarn? How did you find it to work with?