Stefanie Snider

Stitch ‘N Bitch Superstar Knitting: Go Beyond the Basics

gwen — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

I have a confession to make: I am not much of a knitter. I feel like I should be, and I’ve tried to get beyond the basics numerous times in my life, but to little avail. My mom was a fantastic knitter. She inspired me to try it as a child, but I never quite got the hang of it. I focused instead on cross-stitch and other needlework and yarn crafts, as well as other art and craft forms more generally. Maybe the knitting talent skipped a generation. If so, my niece should be an excellent knitter (my sister-in-law is an admitted failure at knitting too and I don’t think my brother has ever tried it).

Lucky for me, my partner is an extraordinary knitter. Between holidays and my birthday, I’ve probably received six new and gorgeous knitted gifts from her this past year, with arm warmers, a hat, a cowl scarf, and a headband just in the past two months. She inspires me and makes me jealous at the same time! I want to be able to make her and the rest of my friends and family knitted gifts too! So, when I had the opportunity to read legendary yarn artist Debbie Stoller’s newest knitting book, Stitch N’ Bitch Superstar Knitting, I took advantage—and learned a lot.

By now Stoller has made a serious name for herself in the word of knitting and crocheting, with no less than eight books, journals, and calendars published under the Stitch N’ Bitch name, plus many more patterns published in various online locations. In addition, she’s the co-founder and editor-in-chief of BUST magazine. It’s no wonder why her knitting and crochet books are so popular; Stoller imbues them with a feminist irreverence and sense of humor about crafting mixed with a celebration of what has traditionally been considered “women’s work” for multi-gendered audiences. She makes knitting fun and accessible to a wide range of people—even those of us who have tried and failed to grasp anything more than the basics too many times to count.

Stitch N’ Bitch Superstar Knitting is divided into two sections: the first describes in detail various kinds of advanced knitting techniques, such as intarsia, cabling, lace knitting, and adding embroidery and beads to knit objects, while the second consists of knitting patterns for projects that make use of these kinds of techniques. It is the first half of the book that is particularly stellar here. Stoller excels at writing in a fun, instructional manner for knitters of all stages. She presents the goals of each technique in clear, conversational language and explains through drawings, photographs, and charts what each step of the process should look and feel like. Stoller makes seemingly-complicated procedures, like that of creating cables in a knitted work, seem a natural part of the kitting process. She even critiques or “re-writes” certain conventional knitting instructions to make them easier to understand.

Debbie Stoller’s Stitch N’ Bitch Superstar Knitting: Go Beyond the Basics is a thorough and helpful addition to her catalogue of yarn art texts. It will motivate even the most basic of knitters to want to try something new and more complicated than the stockinette stitch or the potentially monotonous back and forth of a scarf project. I’ve got plans for trying to complete the Hip Hop Bunny Blanket pattern, from the second half of the book, for my niece’s first birthday present in October. Thank goodness it’s ten months away! It might take a while to complete for this still-novice knitter, but with Stoller’s help, I think I’ll make it just in time.

Written by: Stefanie Snider, February 3rd 2011

Lesbian Lust: Erotic Stories

payal — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Sacchi Green

Cleis Press

The stories featured in Sacchi Green’s edited collection of lesbian erotica are intensely sexual. As the name of the volume, Lesbian Lust, implies, each of the stories focus on the deep sensual and sexual desires of the characters featured in them. The narratives are varied in their settings, characterizations, and kinds of sex offered for the reader’s (and their companions’) interest. As Green writes in her introduction to the volume, “Variety is also the spice of lust.”

Many of the stories are not for the faint of heart; there are few typically “vanilla” sex acts and story lines included in Lesbian Lust. This said, the volume presents a wonderfully wide-ranging assortment of active, desiring lesbian subjects who are in charge of their own sexuality, whether they play out their own fantasies or submit at their own will to the desires of their partner(s). The stories are kink-friendly and as one might imagine of a collection written by and for lesbians, sex- and woman-positive. Overall, this was my favorite aspect of the collection of stories. Even if any one story didn’t fall within my own particular set of turn-ons, I appreciated reading the entire group of stories for their collective interest in portraying lesbians in powerful positions, engaging one another in both playful and serious emotional, psychological, and/or physical situations.

Perhaps my favorite story of the collection, “The Office Grind” by R.G. Emanuelle, brings sex to the boardroom as Casey secretly tends to Nina, company Vice President, while Nina participates in a business meeting with her pompous and oblivious male co-workers. The story is simultaneously sexy and funny, and makes the introduction of cunnilingus to the workday seem a brilliant idea to chase away the staid boredom all too typical of a desk job, especially for a female executive who is used to being treated as a second-class citizen both by her boss and her subordinates. “The Office Grind” turns on its head the conventional voyeuristic tale of men getting off on watching lesbians having sex, emphasizing Nina’s business and sexual power in the face of her ignorant co-workers. Using wordplay to drive the story home, “The Office Grind” brings a whole new meaning to the terms “powerpoint” and “working lunch.”

I highly recommend this story, and the Lesbian Lust collection as a whole to the reader looking for multi-layered tales of sex, romance, and power in all sorts of lesbian relationships.

Written by: Stefanie Snider, November 18th 2010

Running Dark

alicia — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Jamie Freveletti

William Morrow

Running Dark is the second book in Jamie Freveletti’s action-mystery-thriller series featuring chemist and long-distance runner Emma Caldridge. The first book, Running from the Devil, establishes the character of Caldridge as a strong scientist with a flair for quick thinking and physical endurance in the worst of situations. Running from the Devil followed Caldridge as her commercial plane was hijacked and crashed in the Colombian rainforest; Caldridge managed to get away from the group of surviving passengers as they were rounded up and lead through the forest by a group of Colombian fighters playing the middlemen for a drug cartel, intent on ransoming the survivors at their destination.

Caldridge demonstrated her physical and mental endurance as well as her scientific knowledge of natural chemistry, as she carefully followed the group through the Colombian jungle, surviving first on the remains of increasingly-rancid airplane food and then native plants. The group walked several miles a day; as Caldridge followed, she often had to race ahead or double back to avoid detection, landmines, and another mysterious group who begins to track her path with the help of trained dogs.

Occasionally, crash survivors were killed by the Colombian fighters, or left for dead on the path. When the kidnappers realize that Cameron Sumner, a U.S. government agent, might threaten their plan for ransoming the survivors, they hurt him badly. Caldridge eventually stumbles upon him, helps him through infection and fever, and makes an ally in the process. Their dependence on one another for personal survival and professional secrecy established the core relationships at work in the next book in the series.

Following on the heels of Freveletti’s first thriller, Running Dark takes place in South Africa, Somalia, and on the high seas of the Gulf of Aden as Caldridge makes her way from an endurance race during which she survives a roadside bomb and injection by an unknown substance to a cruise ship in peril of being overrun by Somali pirates. On that cruise ship is Cameron Sumner, working for Darkview, a United States-based independent security firm.

The pirate strike is a surprise to Sumner and the crew; because weapons are illegal on cruise ships, they barely manage to stave off several attacks using Sumner’s smuggled gun and the help of several passengers and crew members. Meanwhile, no one but Caldridge and the Darkview team back in the U.S. know that amongst the cargo on the ship might be several vials of Sarin, a colorless, odorless, and very deadly chemical weapon. When Caldridge finally reaches the imperiled boat, Sumner and Calderidge work with the crew and passengers of the ship to fight the invasion and try to safely operate the ship despite the nearly-constant threat of chemical and conventional attacks.

As was Running from the Devil, Running Dark is fast-paced and filled with interesting details about the characters’ lives, work habits, and career-oriented knowledge. The chapter narratives move back and forth in point of view from the bad guys to the good guys, keeping the reader on her/ his toes and introducing new and dangerous scenarios every few pages. Running Dark is not as all-absorbing as is Running from the Devil, and unfortunately there are several chapters that feel as if they are marking time until the final climax. I highly recommend reading the first novel before the second in order to contextualize the relationships and understand the back story of the events and characters revisited in Running Dark; if you’re a fan of international thrillers and/ or layered female characters, give Freveletti’s Emma Caldridge a try in this series.

Written by: Stefanie Snider, October 4th 2010

The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica

mandy — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

By Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Terrace Books

Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s The Big Bang Symphony begins with one big bang and ends with another. A plane crashes on its way to McMurdo Station on Antarctica while carrying several of the continent’s summer residents, including Rosie Moore and Mikala Wilbo, two of the three female protagonists of the story. Everyone survives except for one unnamed woman; we find that her death and the crash subsequently inform the lives of the main characters, as we follow Rosie, Mikala, and Alice Neilson as they attempt to carry out their respective work on “the Ice.”

Each woman has come to Antarctica in search of something: for Rosie, a constant traveler with strained family relations, it is money toward the purchase of her first stable home; for Mikala, a renowned up-and-coming composer, it is a father she never really knew and an escape from the grief still following her after her partner’s death three years prior; for Alice, a geologist and the youngest among them, it is evidence that the earth has survived previous global warmings and will continue to do so. Each search revolves around at least one man in the characters’ lives, though the women’s burgeoning relationships with each other come to dominate and fortify one another in achieving their separate quests.

Rosie makes a strong impression on Mikala in the aftermath of the plane crash and ignites her romantic, sexual, and musical interests. Mikala cannot get Rosie out of her mind, even as she struggles each day to write the first music she has composed since her partner’s death. Rosie, in the meantime, becomes obsessed with one man, all too married, and distracts herself with another. Alice, committed on several levels to her advisor, finds herself pushed beyond her comfort zone and begins to emotionally react in ways she has never let herself do before. When an emergency strikes, the women are tested and find themselves opening up to experiences that had previously challenged them, causing them to change in a setting hostile to most growth.

The reader will quickly find that Bledsoe’s choice of setting—the gorgeous, yet deadly landscape of Antarctica—figures as a main character in and of itself rather than simply as a background against which the action of the novel plays out. Indeed, it is the ways in which the characters live on and with such an inhumane environment that propels each to reach out to one another to attempt to accomplish their goals and survive the short, harsh summer at the South Pole. Bledsoe consistently, if occasionally awkwardly, imbues each chapter of the novel with the themes of life and death, music, travel, and the relationship between an individual and the cosmos.

The Big Bang Symphony was a compelling read from the start, save perhaps the initial chapters written from Alice’s perspective, which can be frustrating in terms of her double devotion to both her mother and to the fastidious nature of science. Rosie’s and Mikala’s stories easily make up for this, however, and as Alice comes into her own on Antarctica, I soon found her narrative equally complex and interesting. In Rosie, Mikala, and Alice, Bledsoe clearly created characters who never would have met had it not been for the coincidence of living on the Ice together; their obvious differences make their incipient and meaningful friendship all the more captivating over the course of the story.

Written by: Stefanie Snider, September 8th 2010