“Once upon a time there was an old woman who loved to knit. She lived with her Old Man in the middle of a woods in a curious one-room schoolhouse which was rather untidy, and full of wool.”
If you enjoy knitting, then you’ve no doubt heard of Elizabeth Zimmermann, the British-born knitter and designer whose mission was to make knitting easy, simple and completely up to the knitter.
Aiming for the sweet spot of creativity and practicality, Elizabeth did for at-home knitters what Julia Child did for at-home chefs: demystify a process that looks intimidating but actually isn’t.
Like Julia, Elizabeth wrote several books and hosted a public television show that brought knitting, purling and custom-sizing to home knitters in the 1970s. She started her own publishing house, taught Knitting Camp for decades, and introduced seamless design to garments that were previously complicated and fussy.
Born in England in 1910, Elizabeth learned to knit from her mother and aunts, who taught her to knit English style. She attended boarding school, then art school in Switzerland and German, where her Swiss governess taught her continental knitting. (The difference lies in which hand holds the working yarn.)
In 1937 Elizabeth and her husband Arnold, a German brewery owner from Bavaria, immigrated to the United States. They first lived in New York, then moved with their three children to Wisconsin.
Once there, Elizabeth turned her knitting hobby into a business, determined to make the craft fun instead of fussy.
Before Elizabeth, knitting was done on straight needles of various widths. Garments were knit in pieces — for a sweater, that would be two sleeves, a front and a back — and then seamed together. Elizabeth had no time for that, and instead created circular needles (two needles joined by a cord) to knit the body of the sweater as a tube, marking where the sleeves would be added. Once the body was finished, the sleeves are knit directly from the body of the sweater.
Knitting in the round, as the technique is called, wasn’t Elizabeth’s only innovation. She believed strongly that garments should be made to fit each individual rather than the knitter trying to fit herself to a one-size-only pattern. Elizabeth wanted knitters to make what they wanted in any size and with any yarn they liked.
To help knitters adapt patterns, she created the Elizabeth Percentage System (EPS), a formula that enables designers and knitters to calculate sizing. She also applied mathematical principals to her design process, using geometry to determine spacing for the increases to create a perfect circumference for her Pi shawl, and algebra to create the unending curve of the Mobius scarf.
Despite all that math, Elizabeth’s designs were surprisingly simple. The construction of her Baby Surprise Jacket, for example, is based on origami, with the body and sleeves knit flat as one continuous rectangle that, when folded in half and seamed up the sides, forms a perfect cardigan, almost like magic.
In the early days of her knitting career, Elizabeth wrote patterns for publication by yarn companies and in magazines. But when an editor at Vogue Knitting rewrote a pattern Elizabeth had designed to be knitted in the round, changing it to be knitted on straight needles instead, Elizabeth decided to publish her patterns herself.
She founded Schoolhouse Press, named for the one-room schoolhouse she and her husband converted to their residence in the late 1950s. Her goal was to supply knitters with pure wool and circular needles, which were hard to find at the time, among other tools and patterns.
She published a semi-annual newsletter filled with patterns, techniques and her own musings on knitting, and in 1981 published her first book, Knitting Without Tears. Her second book, The Knitters’ Almanac, featured one pattern a month presented with her practical, having-coffee-with-a-friend style.
“It’s better not to make mittens in a hurry,” Elizabeth writes as she introduces a pattern for mittens. “Let’s make them in May; let’s take our time over them; let’s venture into new approaches and designs; let’s enjoy them.”
PBS came calling in the late 1970s, and like Julia Child, Elizabeth said yes to her own show. Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitting Workshop aired for two seasons, with Elizabeth sitting in front of piles of hand-knits, dispensing advice and showing the folks at home that honestly, knitting’s not that hard.
“The whole thing about needle sizes is terribly fraught,” she says in one episode, “so pay no attention — please! — to any directions when they tell you the size of the needle.”
Today, Schoolhouse Press remains a successful family publishing and supply company run by Elizabeth’s daughter Meg Warner, a renowned knitting designer in her own right who joined her mother’s business in 1961. In addition to Elizabeth’s books and patterns, Schoolhouse publishes other designers and runs Knitting Camp, an annual retreat that started in 1978 when the University of Wisconsin asked Elizabeth to teach a summer extension class.
But it’s Elizabeth’s straight-forward approach to knitting that is her legacy. Two-color knitting, Fair Isle, Aran, short rows, lace knitting, invisible seams, drop shoulder — Elizabeth’s techniques are standard practice today. And while it sounds complicated, Elizabeth would insist it’s really not.
“I don’t want you to pay any attention to directions at all,” she said. “I want you to make your own directions.”