Book Review: "Knitting Without Tears", By Elizabeth Zimmermann

Basic techniques and easy-to-follow directions for garments to fit all sizes. Elizabeth presents her own unique "percentage system" for creating your knitted garment without a row-by-row pattern.

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Elizabeth Zimmermann died in 1999, but her passion for knitting lives on in her books, videos and in the publishing house she founded, Schoolhouse Press, now run by her daughter Meg Swansen.

"Knitting Without Tears" is my favorite knitting book, and Elizabeth remains my mentor and inspiration. My copy of the book is a testament to our shared passion for the art of knitting: dog-eared is a kind word to use for this tattered, coffee-stained paperback full of my own sketches, measurements, and notes about the items I've knit as gifts for my own grandchildren.

Don't be put off by the basic nature, and I might even say dated styles, of the patterns found within. I treasure this book for it's chatty style and for Elizabeth's sense of humor, perception, and digressions ("These words are being written on a desert island in the middle of an uppopulated lake in Ontario.") as much as I do for the actual knitting information. Her advice to "lie down in a darkended room for fifteen minutes to recover" after cutting armholes into a knitted sweater, will make me smile forever.

More than any other knitter, Elizabeth's knitting philosophy has given me the tools, courage and belief in myself to venture forth into our craft with resourcefulness and creativity.

And I still pick up this book whenever I run into a problem, to get a sense of, or some "pithy instructions" on, how Elizabeth would do it.

Not everyone will appreciate Elizabeth's chatty style, digressions and not always easy to understand directions. There are other books that suit the beginning knitter better, Elizabeth assumes you know the basics.

In order to fully appreciate Elizabeth, you have to understand the times in which she wrote, and the circumstances in which she lived. She was a European living in the U.S. Many Europeans take much of what she taught as everyday knowledge. But in the U.S. the yarn companies more or less "owned the show"; a knitter bought their yarn, bought their patterns, and knitted accordingly.

Elizabeth started her writing career submitting patterns to the likes of Vogue Magazine, only to have them returned with admonitions to "write in the accepted pattern form".

This is not how Elizabeth knitted, so why would she write that way? Her solution was to write her own books. She encouraged us to knit the same way: observe the world through a knitter's eyes, take our measurements and apply her percentage system to decide how many stitches to cast on and how many rows or rounds to knit.

She taught us to attack each problem as a creative challenge, showing us how to knit a sock on a desert island when we don't have our nylon thread for the heel with us (the "afterthought heel"), how to finish a sweater in a different weight yarn if we've run out of the original yarn, how to knit with odd bits of color and not end up with a tangled mess of yarn, and how to add pockets to a pocketless sweater. I hear that in one of her videos, she cuts her sweater with scissors and knits a pocket without taking the sweater off.

Much of what Elizabeth dared to write and knit is now common knowledge to American knitters. How much of this is due to her and her alone, is difficult to say. Knitting is a "folk art" in the sense that it is something not just read about in books, but is passed on from generation to generation, culture to culture. If you make it your 'own', you contribute to the art. To those of us knitting at that time, she opened our eyes to possibilities beyond just following a pattern.

If you've ever looked at a pile of assorted yarns and wondered what you could make with it, if you love to knit but hate to purl, or if you've looked at a sweater and wondered "how'd they do that?", you have a lot in common with Elizabeth and you'll love this book. Making buttonholes, knitting sweaters, socks, mittens, gloves, hats, skirts! you name it, it's all here. And so is the twinkle in Elizabeth's eyes.

You can also find "Knitting Without Tears" on my bookshelf at Powell's Bookstore. [Currently out of stock]

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