By Lauren Bishop
The Cincinnati Enquirer

If you're not a 20- or 30-something woman, you might not know the name Debbie Stoller - but you should.

Stoller co-founded the feminist magazine Bust, which helped pioneer the philosophy that it's OK to both crusade for women's rights and embrace the things - makeup, fashion, bad television, sex - that the stereotypical feminist shunned. She used the now 10-year-old quarterly publication to make knitting and other domestic arts more visible and celebrated in popular culture. Her new book, Stitch 'n Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook (Workman Publishing; $13.95) tells how she came to "take back the knit" herself, how to make everything from a simple scarf to a cell phone holder and how to form your own Stitch 'n Bitch group.

How did the book come about?

I was writing about knitting quite a bit in Bust, and Workman Publishing thought that I might be onto something with the new knitting culture that was rising. I had been teaching a lot of girls to knit in my Stitch 'n Bitches, and I wanted to have a chance to try to lay out some really extremely clear instructions. A lot of people don't have access to their grandmothers, and their mothers don't knit, and they don't have people around them to really teach them.

In your book you talk about how the media has been saying for a while that knitting is making a comeback. When do you think this started happening?

It certainly wasn't because of me. When I started getting obsessed again, in 1999, it's true that at that time yarn stores were still closing down.

Then by around 2000, already it started to pick up. I have to say also that around that time, really simple knit clothing also sort of became the fashion.

Part of it was that people started to feel that hand-knit stuff would look cool on them again, after that look had sort of been out of favor for a while. Part of it was that a lot of different young feminists started to think about reclaiming the work that their mothers and their grandmothers had done. There was also at the same time this other thread in the culture of just trying to get away from this global corporate culture of everything being made in sweatshops and everything looking the same and being made really wastefully. Or people wanted to make stuff themselves.

What do you think it is about knitting as opposed to other kinds of sewing or embroidery or crocheting? Or are those becoming more popular too?

Yeah, actually, they all are. Sewing is great, but it's not very portable. The actual sewing itself on a machine is more of a task that you do to get to the final project. But knitting is something where you have to like the task. . . . I hope that that will stay with us, because that's really important to me. And I think that's important to our culture in general, that we get that appreciation for what women have done for centuries.

Book signing Thursday

Debbie Stoller will discuss and sign copies of her book, Stitch 'n Bitch: A Knitter's Handbook, 7 p.m. Thursday, at Books & Co., 350 E. Stroop Road, Kettering. Information: (937) 298-6540.