. Let's subject it to the No-Bull Book Review treatment.
Stashbuster Knits (Potter Craft) is a paperback book, 144 pages, approximately 9 x 9 inches. MSRP is $19.99; available for $13.59 as of the time of this writing through the link above. In the introduction, Leapman good-naturedly (and accurately) describes the typical knitter's stash:
Some of this treasured collection consists of one or two extra balls of yarn purchased "just in case." Much of it is just partial balls--precious bits and pieces left over from completed projects. Then there are those times a single ball of this or that lands in the stash because it's something you are curious to try out, or perhps it was an irresistible bargain, happily discovered in a hidden sale bin. And who can resist picking up yarn as a souvenir from vacations and business trips?Leapman cannily notes that although we love our stash, we also find it guilt-provoking because we know "there's just so much potential in there, if only we could figure out what to do with it." But first, she cautions, we need to know what in our stash, and be able to retrieve it. Accordingly, part 1 of the book is devoted to stash organization.
Puzzle Play
Cables and Colors
Part Two is the project section, organized by yarn weight. The first section, devoted to lace-, fingering/sock and sportweight yarns, contains 5 projects, the Boho Bangles (best for using up small quantities of leftover yarn), a striped market bag, a cowl,
Fire and Ice Cozy Cowl
a bias striped scarf and a baby kimono with zigzag stripes on the body and a geometric stripe on the sleeves.
The section on lightweight yarns (dk weight) includes the Harlequin bag,
Harlequin
Sea of Blue
a tote bag, a cabled yoke sweater, a circular-shaped medallion jacket
Roundabout
Strathaven
Urban Knitster Slouch Hat
Bravissimo Throw
One thing that is especially helpful, and appears throughout the pattern section, are little boxes with tips and suggestions for customizing the patterns. For example, the sample garment for the men's sweater is done in a blue colorway, but photos are given of two alternate colorways, one in browns, another in neutrals.
For knitters who are nervous about selecting colors, or who aren't good at imagining different color combinations together, this is a great help. Other boxes include tips on yardage (noting, for example, that colors used for one part of a sweater will require more yardage than colors used later in the pattern), ideas for tweaking size or style, and suggestions for how to best use scrap yarn in that design.
As one might expect, you'll find all the amenities that Potter Craft books are known for: color charts, schematics, clear photographs, close-ups of design details. and an easy-to-read layout. We've already covered the weight of the yarns used (everything under the sun). Sizing is generous; men's sweaters run from around a 43-inch finished chest to 61 to 64-inch finished chest, andwomen's sweaters go from around 34 to 35-inch finished bust through 3X, around 48 to 55-inch finished bust. The baby kimono is sized for 6/12/18/24 months, mittens are adult women's/men's; the child's sweater runs 2/4/6/8/10, and the rest of the items are primarily one size items (e.g. bags, throw, scarf).
Project count goes like this:
- 2 throws/blankets
- 3 women's sweaters
- 2 men's sweaters
- 2 hats
- 1 pair of mittens
- 3 bags
- 1 cowl & 1 scarf
- 1 bangle cover
- 2 shawls/stoles
- 1 baby's sweater
- 1 kid's sweater
Summing up, Melissa Leapman presents a versatile collection of good-looking patterns designed to use small amounts of yarn and other leftovers from the knitter's stash. There's a little bit of something for everyone in this book, and the technical information on organizing stash and combining colors will be helpful for knitters who feel overwhelmed by their odds and ends. And thanks to the generosity of Potter Craft, I've got a copy of Stashbuster Knits to give away. Leave a comment (one per person, please) no later than midnight, Thursday, December 1st and I'll draw a random winner the next morning. Make sure you include an email address or some other way I can get in touch with you or I'll pick another name. (I moderate comments, so if your comment doesn't show up instantly, please be patient!)
by Deanna Raybourn, was another entry in the lightweight Lady Julia Grey series. In this installment, Lady Julia is a newlywed, and she and her new husband Brisbane have just returned to London. Lady Julia's brother seeks out Brisbane's help but swears him to secrecy about the nature of his problem, which only serves to whet Lady Julia's curiosity. She ends up following Brisbane to a gentlemen's club -- not the kind featuring pole dancers, but the kind where seances are held. Good escapist fun set in Victorian England.
and continuing through the series to 
. (Remember, this is over three months, including two beach vacations!) I really enjoyed this series, featuring a world-weary Sicilian police inspector who has to figure out tricky ways to work within the corrupt and complex Italian justice system. If you like mysteries, I'd highly recommend these -- they are suspenseful and well-written, and Camilleri does a wonderful job evoking the atmosphere of the imaginary village he has created. I was lucky my local library had so many of the books in this series, as I plowed through a bunch of them while on vacation.
. The book begins with the death of a troubled teen named Jon Moreno. He jumps into a lake while on a weekend trip and drowns, before his two friends have time to save him. Over the course of the book, we learn a lot more about all three young men, in more of a psychological study than a police procedural. Creepy and heavy on the psychological tension.
by Charles Todd. I am a fan of Todd's Ian Rutledge series; this is a second, more recent mystery series set in the same WWI-era time period, but featuring an army nurse named Bess Crawford. This is the third book in the series and I think the series is getting better each time out. While on leave from duty, Bess returns to her London flat, only to find a woman huddled in the doorway. She invites her in and gets sucked into the woman's life. The woman claims she was beaten by her husband, but wants to returm home -- if Bess will go with her. Once you get past the unlikeliness of a WWI nurse giving up precious leave to accompany a virtual stranger to her country home, the mystery gets interesting.
, in which Gamache spends some time in Montreal recovering from the violent gunfight that ended a recent investigation. This book was really moving in the way it travels back and forth from the past to the present, slowly revealing the events that changed Gamache's life. The most recent book in the series, 
, didn't affect me as deeply, but was still very good, centering around the death of a thoroughly unpleasant art critic in the garden of a rural village.
by Erik Larson. Larson seeks to answer the very compelling question of why the U.S. and other countries either didn't realize what Hitler's intentions were earlier in time. Thus Larson's book begins in 1933, when William Dodd, a Chicago professor, is named ambassador to Berlin. Dodd moved his family to Berlin (even shipping his car overseas so he wouldn't have to buy a new one while there) and we see how reports of German atrocities and aggression are tempered by the German government's assurances that Hitler means no harm. Especially striking is the way in which Dodd, an outsider to the diplomatic corps, has misgivings that keep getting bigger even as folks back in the US don't seem to be paying much attention to what he has to say.
by noted historian Alison Weir. Mary Boleyn was the subject in recent years of a lot of historical fiction, and Weir takes a no-nonsense look at what is known about Boleyn (not much) and what has been invented about her (most of what people think they know about her). It's a good book, although the big problem is that when you're writing about a woman who lived so long ago and didn't leave much of a written record about herself, there's only so much to say. Weir ends up with more to say about what Mary Boleyn was not, than what she was, which makes the topic a bit unsatisfying (but is not the fault of the author).
by Julia Scheeres is a history of the Jonestown massacre. Scheeres herself was raised by a fundamentalist Christian family and as a teen, she and her brother were sent to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. Her perspective gives her, I think, a special empathy for the victims of Jim Jones, and inspired some of the survivors to speak to her for the first time on the record. She pored over thousands of pages of newly-released government documents, too, for a thorough look at what happened and why.
, by Jennifer Donnelly. I'd read good reviews of this book and I thought I'd give it a try, perhaps then recommending it to my 13 yr old. I really liked the book, which is set both in the present time and during the French Revolution. I have since learned that the author is a fellow graduate of the University of Rochester (we probably overlapped by 2 years) which made me like her even more. When I had the chance to scored a free copy of a book called 
by the same author, I jumped. While I enjoyed The Wild Rose, it was more of a sprawling family saga (intended for adults) and was the third in a series (I hadn't read any of the earlier ones). It took place in the years around World War I, and the story stretched from the mountains of Asia and Africa to London to Turkey.
by Katherine Howe, for some absolutely ridiculous price like three bucks on a remainder table. I enjoyed the book, which tells the story of a grad student cleaning out her grandmother's house, only to find there is a family connection to one of the witches involved in the Salem witch trials. I felt like I'd read something similar to this before, but it was a good beach book and went fast.
by Keigo Higashino at the library, and I'd read some good reviews of it. (It won the Japanese equivalent of the Booker Prize.) This was one of those books that grabbed me right from the beginning, and I read it in a really short period of time because it was so suspenseful. The book is about a Japanese woman who accidentally kills her nasty ex-husband, then disposes of the body with the help of her next-door neighbor (who she doesn't really know very well until this point). The plot is twisting and intricate and I guess you'd describe it as a psychological thriller as much as a police procedural.
by William Brodrick, is a thriller that begins when an old man asks a monk what to do when the world turns against you. The monk tells him to seek sanctuary. The old man turns out to be a Nazi war criminal and he does seek sanctuary (in the historic sense of the word) in the monk's priory. The monk -- who is a former barrister -- is ordered by his chapter to investigate the old man's case. This was a good thriller which flips back and forth between WWII and the present day. A quick, suspenseful read.
by Michael Koryta. This novel deserves the word "gripping": as it begins, we see a Depression-era drifter is on a train to find work at a Civilian Conservation Corps site in Florida. The drifter, named Arlen Wagner, has a strange gift -- he can see in advance when someone is going to die. (When someone is not long for this world and Wagner looks at him, he sees smoke in their eyes and a skeleton instead of a body.) Wagner looks around the train he's on and sees smoke in the eyes of everyone around him, which can only mean that something horrific is going to happen to the train. He gets off at the next station, taking his young friend with him. They end up at Cypress House, a kind of deserted inn on the Gulf Coast. Wagner and his friend get sucked into the world of Cypress House's owner, the lonely Rebecca Cady and have to face the fury of a Gulf Coast tropical storm along with the twisted and corrupt small town sheriff and his cronies. A really good read (I can just imagine the movie).
