Another of the new Stitch Nation by Debbie Stoller yarns that we've been looking at this week is Alpaca Love, an 80 percent wool, 20 percent alpaca lovely that makes perfectly straight, even stitches.

The fabric is just a little firm, meaning it would knit up into a perfect and perfectly warm colorwork sweater for you or anyone else you might want to knit such a sweater for. It would also be great for textured knitting of any sort.

I haven't tried it for such an application yet, but I'll bet it would be great for felting, too. I might just have to try that with the leftover bits...

Looking back on when the first Stitch 'N Bitch book came out, it's easy to see how influential the books and the movement have been. There probably would still be knitting meetups and people knitting in public as much as we have today without the books, but they certainly introduced the concept to a lot of people and SnB groups are now all over the world.

So today I'm wondering how Stitch 'N Bitch might have affected you through the years. Maybe you're one of the knitters who learned your craft from the books, or maybe you've just knit a few projects from them. Either way, I'd love to hear your SnB stories.

The poll, by the way, is multiple choice, so please check all applicable boxes.

Because I'm spotlighting the Stitch Nation yarns this week, I though it would also be fun to take a closer look at some of the books that made the Stitch 'N Bitch series so popular. To begin at the beginning, the original Stitch 'N Bitch is credited with being highly influential to a new generation of knitters, thanks to its combination of fun, funky patterns, you-can-do-it spirit and feminist edge.

I remember falling in love with the book when it first came out. I was just getting back into knitting after a hiatus in college, and I was happy to find a book that seemed to speak to younger knitters who wanted patterns that didn't look like something their grandmothers would make (as usual, nothing against knitting grannies, since I learned to knit from one!).

The book is still a lot of fun, full of projects with an edge, though such projects are a lot more common these days than they were back when a lot fewer knitters were sharing patterns online.

Debbie Stoller, best known for her Stitch 'N Bitch series of books, recently launched a new yarn line, Stitch Nation, with Red Heart yarns. The idea is that the line will provide high-quality, natural fiber yarns such as were formerly only available at specialty yarn shops, but these will be much more widely available and, likewise, much less expensive.

Through the week we'll be taking a look at all of these yarns, which the folks at Coats & Clark were nice enough to send me a sneak preview of. The first is Bamboo Ewe, a blend of bamboo and wool that's both fluffy and silky, with a bit of sheen.

It's an incredibly soft yarn in just really lovely colors (as all three yarns in the line are). As soon as I started working with it, I wanted to knit a striped sweater with it (so you'll probably see one of those in the future). And since the yarn costs less than $5 a pop, it would be a pretty sweater and a pretty inexpensive sweater at the same time.