Wise words of Elizabeth Zimmerman

KNIT ON, with CONFIDENCE and HOPE through all crises.

Really, all you need to become a GOOD KNITTER are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course, SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE such as yours and mine, is an ADVANTAGE.

...there are few knitting problems that will not yield to a blend of COMMON SENSE, INGENUITY and RESOURCEFULNESS...

Properly practiced, KNITTING sooths the TROUBLED SPIRIT,
and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled one either.

When time are tough I sit down to SPIN during the news broadcasts, with therapeutic results. KNITTING as you know is therapy too.

A swatch is not WASTED LABOR by any means. It makes an excellent POCKET.

My kind of character enjoys work best when work is fun, and progress can be noted and gloated over. When I have a long plain piece of knitting ahead I put a safety-pin at each day’s beginning to show me how I am coming.

I know that spinning sets me in a trance; it soothes me and charges my batteries at the same time. When times are tough I sit down to spin during the news-broadcasts, with therapeutic results. Knitting, as you well know, is therapy too.

...how comforting to be engaged in the creation of artifacts for which the demand is—as far as I can see—infinite.

For people allergic to wool, one’s heart can only bleed. Synthetics are a marvelous substitute, but a substitute is all they are.

Now comes what I perhaps inflatedly call my philosophy of knitting. Like many philosophies, it is hard to express in a few words. Its main tenets are enjoyment and satisfaction, accompanied by thrift, inventiveness, an appearance of industry, and, above all, resourcefulness.

Really, handknitting is a dreamy activity, built into many people's thumbs and fingers by genes already there, itching to display their skills and achievement possibilities.

One tends to give one's fingers too little credit for their own good sense.

But unvented - ahh! One un-vents something; one unearths it; one digs it up, one runs it down in whatever recesses of the eternal consciousness it has gone to ground. I very much doubt if anything is really new when one works in the prehistoric medium of wool with needles. The products of science and technology may be new, and some of them are quite horrid, but knitting? In knitting there are ancient possibilities; the earth is enriched with the dust of the millions of knitters who have held wool and needles since the beginning of sheep. Seamless sweaters and one-row buttonholes; knitted hems and phoney seams - it is unthinkable that these have, in mankind's history, remained undiscovered and unknitted. One likes to believe that there is memory in the fingers; memory undeveloped, but still alive.

Now, let us all take a deep breath and forge on into the future; knitting at the ready.