I had heard about The Opinionated Knitter, which collects EZ's newsletters from 1958-1968, somewhere on the knitting internet (the knitternet?), so when I saw it on the library shelf I snatched it up with great enthusiasm. That enthusiasm was rewarded. Not only has Meg Swanson collected the newsletters themselves, she has interspersed them with pictures of the projects (some of which were published at the time in mainstream knitting magazines, but with the somewhat incoherent, flat-construction directions which prompted EZ to begin the newsletter in the first place), her own comments and clarifications and annotations on the patterns, and excerpts from EZ's writing in other places (e.g. her journals). The patterns themselves, because they are photographic copies of the original hand-typed newsletters, are somewhat hard to read. If I wanted to knit one, I might choose to re-type (or enlarge on photocopy) the pattern with clearer spacing. On the other hand, EZ's patterns tend to be simple (not in concept, but in language--she writes her patterns not in bullet-points, but in prose, so that a direction for an aran cap, say, will contain a line such as, "You will find that Things Happen every 6th rnd; in between you can relax," which is about as accurate a description of the cabling process as I've ever heard) and moreover her design process (Elizabeth's Percentage System, or EPS, in its various stages) invites--and on occasion demands--the knitter to stray from the pattern and become a designer as well, so perhaps the "improvement" wouldn't be necessary after all.
So I was going along, taking my time and enjoying the view (knitting books are better consumed slowly) when my mother, who doesn't knit, picked up the book and flipped through it. She stopped on a page with a picture of EZ's journal (and the typed transcription of same) from a camping trip she and "Gaffer" (and their cat) took while she was working on Knitter's Almanac. Mom laughed an scoffed and read aloud this passage:
"KLINE [the cat] and I have abandoned the campfire to its
spitting and hissing fate, along with a pot of coffee-water, hopefully suspended over it, and have retired to the tent. He kneads himself a bed on my heavy camp sweater, which he prefers to all the Hudson's Bay blankets and down jackets offered to him. I don't blame him; it is made of beautiful old dark Oatmeal Sheepsdown with a natty Tyrolese border of Loden green and black. Over the years it has lengthened to a 3/4 coat and it is the sweater which had it's pockets removed and re-inserted much higher up. Blah, blah, blah, who cares?"
The last part, clearly is my mother's contributory comment.
I, with my usual cutting wit, looked at her in shock, mouth agape, then said, "Well...knitters!" Unexpectedly, I knew I'd hit on something--it made me think about the way EZ's influence has worked on the knitting world. Even though she grew up and learned to knit pre-WWII, in a time when handknitting was still mostly necessity, her writing never treats knitting as anything less than a marvel, an artisanal craft, and a passion. The audience for EZ's work is never "people who knit", or "housewives", or "consumers", but always Knitters as a category of human beings with their own needs and lives and creative will.
You'll often hear comments about EZ's books (particularly Knitting Without Tears) that go along the lines of "Elizabeth...gave me a sense of being able to believe that most things in knitting--and life too--happen in ways that are open to an inquiring brain. Perhaps that sounds too dramatic, but I know that what I learned from her changed me for the better in every way I can understand it." This quote, which I took from the end of the book, is one of many excerpted from letters sent to the Zimmermans after EZ's death in 1999. Her work touched people in a very personal way; we are interested in her writing, like the above passage than failed to thrill my mother and the discussion of the overrated evils of pilling that follows it, because it feels like she would be interested in us. Not because her experiences are novel and thrilling (although some of them were), but because she talks to the knitter-reader as a peer, a person with a shared love of knitting and shared experience.
(As I type this, I have a cat who has eschewed two beds, several armchairs, a couch, and a sun-lit carpet in favor of sleeping on a half-finished afghan with a circ needle and a crochet hook sticking out of it.)
The Opinionated Knitter is record of the history of modern knitting--love it or loathe it, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun without Elizabeth Zimmerman.
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