Elizabeth Zimmermann Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

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.

Elizabeth Zimmermann
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.

Elizabeth Zimmermann
Pass by the synthetic yarn department, then, with your nose in the air. Should a clerk come out with the remark that All Young Mothers In This Day and Age (why can't they save their breath and say "now"?) insist on a yarn which can be machine-washed and machine-dried, come back at her with the reply that one day, you suppose, they will develop a baby that can be machine-washed and -dried.

Elizabeth Zimmermann
I can knit. I knit all year, day in, day out. It is my passion, and I rarely knit the same thing twice the same way.

Elizabeth Zimmermann
Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn't hurt the untroubled spirit either.

Elizabeth Zimmermann
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.

Elizabeth Zimmermann
Knitting is formed by a series of loops pulled through loops to the end of time or to 'desired length'. By picking up loops and working in the opposite direction you are really picking up the concavities between the loops, and it is sheer unexpected witchcraft that stocking stitch and garter stitch will permit such an anomaly. Be grateful for this and don't expect anymore.

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

Elizabeth Zimmermann
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.

Elizabeth Zimmermann