Elizabeth Zimmermann (August 9, 1910 – November 30, 1999) was a British-born knitter known for revolutionizing the modern practice of knitting through her books and instructional series on American public television.
Though knitting back and forth on rigid straight needles was the norm, she advocated knitting in the round using flexible circular needles to produce seamless garments and to make it easier to knit intricate patterns. She also advocated the Continental knitting method, claiming that it is the most efficient and quickest way to knit. . .
Original patterns
Other patterns and techniques for which she is well known are the so-called "Pi Shawl" a circular shawl that Zimmermann claimed was formed by regularly spaced increases based on Pi – as she said in her book Knitter's Almanac, "the geometry of the circle hing[es] on the mysterious relationship of the circumference of a circle to its radius. A circle will double its circumference in infinitely themselves-doubling distances, or, in knitters' terms, the distance between the increase-rounds, in which you double the number of stitches, goes 3, 6, 12, 24 and so on." The shawl is not, however, based on Pi in any special way, but only on the property common to all two-dimensional shapes in Euclidean geometry that all dimensions increase by the same factor at the same rate; the circular shape is simply created by regularly spacing the increases). . .
