law student swag

So, one of the benefits of being a law student is that the two rival legal research engines try to woo you into becoming loyal to their databases. You see, using the engines as a law student is completely free, but when you become a lawyer and you run a search on one of these engines it will cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of $100-200 every time you click the search button (billed to your client, of course. Ha ha.) So, to lure you in, Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw give you lots of free stuff and you earn points when you search that you can trade in for stuff — and in the case of Lexis Nexis, that “stuff” includes knitting books!! Yay!! And I have to say, their strategy works. I am a total LN devotee, primarily due to the fact that I prefer their rewards program.

Anyway…. I just ordered the book Knit Socks with some of my points. (And I’m saving up for Folk Style!)

I’m really excited about Knit Socks because I’ve heard it is really good to actually teach you about the construction of a sock and not just provide you with patterns. I’m sure I could just blindly follow a pattern, but I would much prefer to actually know what I’m doing – mostly so if I screw up I will have some idea about how far back I have to frog. Ha ha. When I knitted my beginner raglan in the knitalong ($5 in Prague) it was one of those things where knitting the sweater was more about the process of understanding how a top-down raglan is knit and not so much about creating a carbon copy of the sweater in the pattern. This knowledge has helped me immensely as I’m knitting my second top-down, bluebell, because I can actually make modifications and know what I’m doing.

In conclusion – Lexis Nexis may have just helped me in my quest to become an awesome sock knitter … of course, depending on how frustrating I find sock knitting to be, they may have just turned me into a Westlaw convert. Ha ha.