Book Review: Knitting Workshop

Title: Knitting Workshop

Author: Elizabeth Zimmermann

Date: 1981

Publisher: Schoolhouse Press

ISBN: 0-942018-00-1

Length: 177 pages

Quote: “The size of the needle can determine your GAUGE. Your state of mind can influence your GAUGE. In short, GAUGE is an idiosyncratic matter.”

Right. What you might not like about this book is that it’s the first hardcover book Schoolhouse Press (EZ’s children) produced, and it has a quirky 1950s folk-culture look with uneven margins, ALL CAPS in almost every paragraph (to identify the key word or sentence), and underlines for emphasis. It looks amateurish. (The family’s work improved greatly during the 1980s.) And all the illustrations are black-and-white. And the book was well bound, but the materials used were on the cheap side, so without having even been wet or dirty my copy picked up a distinctly musty odor just by being stored in a house in a damp climate. I hate books that do that.

Persevere. Schoolhouse Press really ought to bring out an improved edition, because this amateurish-looking little book should be worth whatever you paid for it if you knit hats and sweaters for sale.

I’ve been posting some discussions of Eighties Sweaters. Well, although she did have colleagues, the trending appeal of hand-knitting in the Eighties was the fruit of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s work. Her work, personal charm, and connections got a weekly show called The Busy Knitter on television, at least in Canada, and created a market for a series of Knitting Workshop videos. This book is the scripts for the videos. EZ was the master knitter from whom all of us learned in the 1980s (as did most people who were knitting in the 1960s and 1970s) and in this book you get her views on the major trends in traditional hand knitting for the next…easily twenty years, actually. (Traditional sweaters go in and out of fashion in New York, but they can be dated to a specific year only if the knitter was thoughtful enough to knit the date into the sweater somewhere.) You get the basics of shaping, first the contemporary “fashion” shapes (including the simple, boxy “Norwegian” shape), then the most memorable of EZ’s quirky garter stitch designs, and then the classic lace shawl, Aran cable, Guernsey textures, and Fair Isle colorwork techniques. If you follow EZ’s instructions for working with your own idiosyncratic “GAUGE” and the size and shape of the person who will be wearing the sweater, you can make any of the designs in this book, using almost any yarn, to fit almost any person.

Used judiciously, they’ll even suit almost any wearer whom they do technically fit. Though EZ marketed wool, her knitting caught the eyes of knitters in the Eighties because the wool she used was blanket-weight or even thicker. EZ lived in Wisconsin and her husband, a lifelong skier, took her to Aspen and other snow-intensive places, so they liked having dozens of snowproof sweaters. You could copy it with the cotton or acrylic yarns the local dime store sold. Many knitters did, and that was how we learned that in places that don’t get a lot of snow people seldom actually wear a snowproof sweater. In Virginia, for example, everybody wants to have one snowproof sweater (often identified with Maine or Canada, depending on the owner’s choice of summer vacation spots) but that sweater will not necessarily be worn every winter. People bitten by the “decluttering” bug will donate theirs to a charity store. There will be more of a demand for lighter, more breathable sweaters. If you want to wear these sweaters indoors, you might want to use cotton, or at least a much lighter-weight wool. They’d still be of the Eighties, and expert knitters would still recognize them as EZ’s designs.

If you want dozens of sweaters, for yourself or for dozens of friends who want an Eighties Sweater, this book is for you. And if you don’t want dozens of sweaters, the Knitting Workshop will also give you enough ideas for distinctive caps and shawls (a heavy, non-reversible shawl is a poncho) to last a lifetime.