Worth it.

Eleven a.m. Thursday in Whitewater the Wisconsin Women's Studies Consortium began it's meeting, which is the kick-off point for the annual co-conferences. The meeting itself is enough to turn one's brain to composting, but what follows is really a pressure cooker of ideas that do indeed need thinking about and acting upon. It's academia times ten, teeming with new ideas and a general push to reexamine everything under the sun. Imagine my delight when I found, on Friday morning, that I had a choice between seeing new art from one of our graduates (Danica Oudeans) or going to a presentation on the godmother of knitting in the round, Elizabeth Zimmermann. I decided to find Danica, see if I could look at the work, (which I did, and I did, and it was incredible) and then head off to the EZ presentation.

The presenters, Colleen McFarland and Kathryn Parks, were both from UW-Eau Claire and gee whiz I wish I worked with them; I'm pretty sure we'd be knitting and geeking out worse even than the knitting and geeking that goes on amongst my faculty/staff/spouse knitting group at UWGB. Elizabeth Zimmermann, it turns out, is really fascinating. The reason people in Wisconsin should know about her is that she lived and worked for many years in Shorewood (outside Milwaukee - her husband Arnold was a brewer for Schlitz) and then moved to a school house in Pittsfield, which I hear is near Wausau. She was worthy of presentation at a Women's Studies conference because a lot of what she did was amazing in terms of "her time." And also, with the upsurge of knitting going on these days, we owe her a lot of credit for keeping it from dying completely in those dark days back in the 70's and 80's (the Knit Your Own Creche days, which gave way to the Cosby Sweater decade.)

Here's a few things you should know about EZ: She hated sewing seams and engineered sweaters knit in the round - this was so rare that Vogue took her knit in the round fair isle pull over and rewrote it to be knit flat, causing the makers to sew some really crazy kinds of seams when, if knit as written, you'd be sewing 2 armholes, or something. They paid her at Vogue simply by giving her credit and noting that if you wanted the yarn for the sweater you could write away to her for it. She was a yarn dealer first, but her marketing is what we know her for best these days: the Opinionated Knitter newsletters; her television show on WPT, "Knitting Without Tears"; and her knitting camps. Knitting camp used to be held through UW-Extension, but the students who went to get college credit couldn't be graded by EZ, since she didn't have an advanced degree - they'd send in some professor who may know nothing about knitting to grade these projects. Eventually, when she moved to the schoolhouse, knitting camp became a week away at a hotel conference facility - but Parks and McFarland argued plausibly that this was a moment of feminist awakening. Many of the campers in the early years had never been away from their homes without their parents, husbands, or children. They'd literally never been by themselves! And so, they learned in that week, how to be independent, and how to think for themselves on issues big and small, while also improving their skills and knowledge of that harmless occupation of women everywhere, knitting. (Why yes, you CAN still go to knitting camp! )

I think people liked EZ on television because she had a folksy manner but was clearly a British woman of a certain age, and therefore, was never seen as a radical. I think of her as the knitting version (with different accent) of Julia Child. They had a similar approach with their subject matter, which was to demystify the process. My first encounter with EZ was at St. Vincent DePaul in Green Bay. I was in used books. I saw one called "The Knitters Almanac" and picked it up to leaf through - the author had two sets of instructions, the proper instructions and some others called The Pithy Instructions. I couldn't believe it - those pithy instructions were for me! Plus the items in the book had that great sort of vintage, but maybe not, feeling about them. I read a lot of the book before I knit a funny little dutch-girl hat to practice knitting on double-points and doing short-rows. She really liked wool, so I liked her. In the talk I saw on Thursday, the presenters made it clear that no one was knitting with wool when EZ was on the air at PBS, so she was marketing the yarn she imported from Iceland and Great Britain with everything she did - it was all wool, and she believed even babies deserved to wear soft lambs wool instead of nasty acrylic. The really sad moment of the presentation was when we found out no one knows what's happened to the footage of that television show. If you have access to dusty archives at your local PBS station, please look for it!

Anyway, I learned more about EZ when one of my students did a good research paper on her a couple years ago. The student, Tamarra, was troubled that the sources she was using were all written by EZ herself. So, I told her to call up School House Press and talk to them. She called, and wound up interviewing EZ's daughter Meg Swensen. The presenters had also taken that route, and are going to be publishing and article on EZ's life for Wisconsin History Magazine. (So watch for that!)

Meanwhile, if you're in my Thursday afternoon class, be on alert that this Thursday we're closing up early so I (and maybe you!) can run back down to Appleton to see Jerilea Zempel at Lawrence. Zempel is responsible for the first of the Tank Cozies (others have been made since). Take a look at this for a good intro. I was her fan even before the Colbert Report!