Knitting is the skill of the autodidact: if you're not one when you start, you will be after a few months. It makes you unafraid in the face of failure, because all you have to do is take the needles out, rip it back, and start again. It helps you conceptualize problems, and think around them. She's right, of course, and the more I think about it, the more I think growing up as a knitter has shaped me as a person.
There are scores of different ways of doing things in knitting, and none of them are wrong, but they are sometimes unsuitable." If it doesn't make sense in your particular circumstances, pay no attention to it seek further. "They know a great deal, but not everything. "The Books don't know everything," she insists at one point. When you read her books, you feel like you can do anything. What is even more unusual is her writing style: where most vintage patterns resemble nothing so much as the Rosetta Stone, EZ wrote clearly, wittily, engagingly. Largely self-taught, she invented or discovered or otherwise put together an astonishing number of techniques, patterns, and recipes for garments - which wouldn't be particularly unusual, except that what makes Zimmermann different is that she wrote a load of them down.
Born in the UK, swiftly relocated to the US, EZ (as she is affectionately known) revitalised knitting, and especially the genre of books associated with getting better at it. Knitters - social knitters, at least - know Elizabeth Zimmermann. This is because it is fantastic, in every respect. I dip into it every few months it's dog-eared and scribbled in, and I've lent it out to at least two other new-ish knitters (usually just after I've taught them to knit for themselves). I have read Knitting Without Tears cover-to-cover twice in the four-ish years since I got my own copy of it. Niche review time! I wish it weren't so niche, actually - I think KWT has an awful lot to recommend it, and not just to knitters.
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