The phrase “knitting camp” arouses a range of reactions running the gamut from incredulity to disbelief.
Or, as camp administrator Cristie Finbraaten’s new employer said when she asked for time off for knitting camp, “Say what?”
Say “Knitadoon,” for once a year, like the enchanted village that came to life every 100 years in the musical “Brigadoon,” knitters gather their wool and needles and create a knitting world in a Wisconsin hotel.
Here, at the camp founded by legendary knitter Elizabeth Zimmermann and now run by her daughter, Meg Swansen, a renowned knitter in her own right, they revel in the company of others who regard a long stoplight as a knitting opportunity.
They spend four days trading techniques, displaying their eye-popping work at show-and-tells and knitting whenever physically possible.
And what’s camp without fun? Some years, campers have written and performed camp songs or skits–who will forget the news-style interviews by “Jane Purly”?
They also have been known to tell dirty jokes, in the early years editing them to somehow incorporate knitting. “Now we’re past that,” Swansen remarked. “We just tell the joke.”
Then there is the annual knitting contest, which several years ago required entrants to knit an item of underwear.
First prize went to an angora jock strap knitted by Lizbeth Upitis, of Minneapolis, author of a book on Latvian mittens. Her husband was so embarrassed when she was knitting it in the car that he begged her to stop when trucks passed by.
Second place went to the “expandable penis heater” made by Carol Anderson, a knitting designer from St. Ansgar, Iowa. It was made of lavender Shetland wool and was adjustable to, as she put it, “accommodate attitude.”
This is not your grandmother’s knitting.
Campers are happy to dispose of stereotypes. Knitters are not all old ladies, although some are very cool old ladies.
There are knitters who aren’t ladies at all; three of the 50 campers at this session were men.
Camper Paula Emons-Fuessle’s teenage sons knit while watching dirt bike videos at home in Washington, Ill.
This camp has attracted doctors, lawyers, bankers and the attorney general of Idaho. Camper Dale Long of New Orleans knits on his lunch hour at his job as office manager of a non-profit law firm that defends people facing the death penalty.
Whatever they do for a living, they knit during every spare moment–and even moments that non-knitters don’t consider spare.
Nancy Robinson of Edmonds, Wash., knits while she drives.
“I have tilt steering,” she explained. “I can steer with my knees.”
And Joan Schrouder of Eugene used to knit at University of Oregon basketball games. She found that she knitted tighter during tense games, so she brought projects that needed snug stitches whenever they played UCLA.
Knitters’ dedication to camp is equally fierce. One year, Becky Skidmore had a broken foot and toe from standing on a sleeping leg, then fell down a flight of stairs and injured the other foot. She still drove in from Ontario.
“I had cruise control,” she shrugged. “I wasn’t missing knitting camp.”
Campers thirst for the techniques they learn here and revel in the company of soul-mates who comprehend lingo like “a three-stitch steek up the arm of a Russian prime.”
“I walked in the first time and said, `I’m home,’ ” said Kay Crowthers, a non-camper this year who nevertheless stopped by on a driving trip to spend an evening knitting with the campers.
“Fiber arts people are really gentle spirits,” said Long. “I’ve always felt there’s real race memory in this. People pick up knitting, and it just feels right.”
And at camp, people pick up the threads of the lives they connect with once a year.
“It’s been so many decades,” Swansen said. “We’re all growing older together, we’re all menopausal together, our children are going to college–it’s a family.”
Here, everyone understands the need to pull out a skein of yarn from time to time and pet it. And no one dismisses knitting as a hobby. These are champion knitters whose gorgeous sweaters and lace tablecloths you would kill to buy if they would sell them to you, which they won’t.
This session in particular, the vaunted “oft-timers” group for people who have been returning for years, includes some of the top knitting designers and writers in the field. Two campers were here for their 24th year.
But even within the fiber arts world, knitting has not always gotten respect.
“Weavers have always felt somewhat superior to knitters, and knitters have always felt that way about crocheters,” explained Swansen. “I don’t know who the crocheters put down.”
But the barriers are falling, Swansen said, and knitting is undergoing a resurgence. There were so many applicants for the first-timers’ camp this year that she had to add another section. And nine people were left on a waiting list for this session, a fact that when announced at the start of camp sent a shudder of dread through the lucky ones already worried about getting in next year.
“My theory is that people want something real,” said Swansen, who writes knitting columns, publishes knitting books, produces instructional videos and runs a mail-order business through her company Schoolhouse Press, in nearby Pittsville, Wis.
They are drawn to knitting, she suggested, because it is a productive activity and uses natural materials.
And knitters swear by its stress-reducing qualities. “It’s very soothing, very hypnotic,” Swansen said. “A lot of people say that knitting is much cheaper than a shrink.
“It’s a total creative outlet. It’s very subversive, in a way. Nobody can tell you what to do. It’s your needles, your wool.”
The camp is the brainchild of Zimmermann, the governess-educated daughter of a cultivated British family. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1937 with her husband, August, a Bavarian brewer who fled the Nazis by posing as a hiker and wound up as vice president of Schlitz in Milwaukee.
She became a legendary knitter and star of public television knitting specials and instructional videos, one of which shows her knitting behind her husband on their motorcycle, yarn streaming in the wind.
Zimmermann also wrote several knitting books that displayed her conversational style and droll wit.
“Exceedingly few old women of over 60 go water-camping in the Canadian north woods. Some of them write picture-postcards, some write home, but I’ll bet that not one in a thousand tries to write part of a book,” she wrote in “Knitters Almanac,” going on to describe the travails of trying to work in a boat while her husband asks questions like whether he remembered his “fish-mouth-holder-opener.”
In 1974, the University of Wisconsin extension service at Shell Lake asked Zimmermann to run a summer knitting program there. The setting was fittingly rustic for a camp; one woman awoke to find a frog on her chest.
Frog notwithstanding, word spread and the camp grew, soon moving to a university extension service in Marshfield. Zimmermann, now 87 and unable to attend camp, in 1989 turned the reins over to her daughter. Four years ago, Swansen moved the camp to the Best Western Marshfield Innkeeper.
The camp has spawned numerous imitators across the country, but the original retains its cachet–partly, Swansen said, by virtue of its central Wisconsin location.
“A lot of the other knitting retreats are `knitting by the sea’ or `knitting in the mountains,’ with gourmet food,” Swansen said. “We don’t have any of that. If you’re coming to this camp, you really want to knit. There’s nothing else to do.”
The knitters take over a large conference room, where Swansen sits at a table. A video camera trained on her hands is connected to two monitors at the front of the room–a system developed by her late husband, a jazz musician and videographer she refers to on the videos they produced as “Camera Guy.”
Campers sit at long tables arranged in a horseshoe shape, watch the monitor and, of course, knit. Balls of yarn occasionally roll across the floor like puppies on the loose.
Anyone who imagines that after 24 years the subject of knitting would be exhausted does not understand the infinite number of techniques and designs possible, and the unquenchable thirst of knitters to invent and discuss them.
The crowd went wild, for example, when Robert Powell, a graphic artist from Queens, N.Y. (a k a “The King of Inventing Eyelets That Go Exactly Over A Stitch,” according to fellow camper Jamie Harmon), demonstrated something he called “knitting in the row ahead,” which Swansen described as the knitting version of one-hand clapping.
It involved passing the entire ball of yarn through loops of yarn, which prompted gasps of amazement.
“What are you, nuts?” said Amy Detjen, Swansen’s knitting assistant.
“Is it crazy enough for you?” he said slyly.
Powell also evoked much hilarity at show and tell when he displayed the lace doily he had knitted of burlap–a “man’s doily,” he pronounced, “suitable for putting in a workshop underneath the drill.”
And campers crowded around for photographs when Eugen Beugler of Eugene, Ore., held up the shantung silk lace 72-inch-diameter round tablecloth he had knitted from an antique German pattern. The twisting, organic designs looked nearly three-dimensional.
“Oh, mercy,” someone breathed.
At least as impressive as his knitting, however, is the fact that Beugler, a retired administrative assistant for the University of Oregon gerontology department who grew up in a family that did needle arts, used to knit in his army barracks in the Aleutian Islands.
“The first thing people would say is, `You’re a braver man than I am,’ ” Beugler said.
Not only does it occasionally take guts to knit–sometimes it takes mathematics. Lois Young, a Michigan Tech University calculus instructor and a 24-year camp veteran, told fellow campers that a University of Chicago mathematics graduate student had given a seminar in Michigan on knitting and math.
Specifically, he discussed whether knitting could be applied to topology, the mathematical study of geometric forms that do not change despite bending or stretching, and whether knitting could be used to make a Mobius strip, a continuous one-sided surface.
Big deal–Zimmermann designed a Mobius scarf years ago.
But knitters know they are often ahead of their times. Or, as it was put by a teenage girl in a class Emons-Fuessle teaches at her church, “Knitters kick butt.”
Tastefully abbreviated as KKB, the phrase has become the class’ unofficial motto. When Emons-Fuessle told the story, the knitting campers’ ears perked up.
“I think we have next year’s T-shirt,” Amy Detjen remarked.
