Two weekends ago, I had the pleasure of attending Meg Swansen’s Knitting Camp with my grandma.

It was an excellent weekend full of knitting, knitting, and more knitting. We learned a ton (short rows, steeking, and bears–oh my!), and it was a lot of fun.

The daily Show and Tell sessions were especially nice. My To Knit list grew quite a bit (I can’t wait to start the Icelandic Overblouse in Unspun Icelandic!–after I finish my teeny tiny yarn sweater, of course), and it was so inspiring to see all the beautiful things knitters can create with two sticks and some string.

Meg was also awesome. She has such an incredible attitude towards knitting (and is definitely her mother’s daughter). Grammy and I had been working on our camp homework beforehand, which were the little baby sweaters pictured above. The pattern called for Elizabeth Zimmerman’s phony seams, which we each looked up in our EZ books, but were a little wary of what this extra work was really accomplishing. Then at camp, Meg explained that it all started when Elizabeth started exposing more people to knitting sweaters in the round, and they would push back with various (unfounded) reasons on why knitting the pieces flat, and then seaming them together was better. Elizabeth always had a (stronger) counter argument, and one of those was phony seams. Basically the advocates of knitting back and forth said that circular sweaters had no seam, so they had no structure, blah blah blah. So in Meg’s words, Elizabeth came up with the phony seam “just to shut them up.” But then she ended up liking how it looked, and how it helped the sweater lay flat, so they stuck! And the beauty of it is that it doesn’t interrupt the lovely rhythm of knitting in the round–you just take care of it at the end!

There were a lot of little stories like that at camp: they said, “you can’t do X in the round,” and Elizabeth said “watch me.”

EZ was so ahead of her time, and a serious engineer of knitting. If women were allowed to be engineers way back then, Elizabeth would have been one of the best. It was humanity’s loss that she wasn’t. I’m sure if she was, this Physics of Knitting article that Grammy sent me last week would have been discovered decades ago. The patriarchy, man.

Overall, it was a great weekend–and Grammy finally got to visit Wisconsin! I bought a book of Fair Ilse motifs from the market at Camp and put it to work in designing my own yoke for that baby sweater we started as homework!

There were definitely a few hiccups along the way (I put my short rows on the wrong side, and the back accidentally became the front–not good enough for my Etsy shop), but I finished it last week, and am overall pretty pleased with the finished product. Now I’m just hanging onto it until someone I know has a baby.

Until then…happy knitting!

 

P.S.

Grammy and I totally forgot we had to make name tags until the day or two before camp, so we had to get creative and I think we succeeded with flying colors! We used yarn scraps to make a mini hank, and also re-purposed a Christmas ornament from last year Teeny Tiny Sweater Ornaments for a name tag on a sweater on a sweater: