Today on episode 104 of the Teaching Your Brain to Knit podcast we have a special treat:  an interview with master knitting teacher Anna Zilboorg.  I recorded this last October while on an Camp Stitches workshop in Coeur d’Alene Idaho.  I was excited to be registered in Anna’s workshop-- Design as You Go Construction.  I have all of Anna’s book and I’ve long admired her philosophy and approach to knitting that she lays out in her book Knitting for Anarchists.   In this interview about both quilting and knitting, Anna shares a bit of her own history, she touches on meditative knitting,  she celebrates our hands,  she talks about learning through the mind and learning with the hands and she worries about knitting becoming rote and- rule bound rather than people growing into being being craftspeople.   Anna's books on Amazon:   https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Anna+Zilboorg&ref=nb_sb_noss_2   Look for her classes at Stitches events.     Information from Wikipedia on terms Anna uses:     accusative —  i.e.  They like them — they is nominative, them is accusative   reflexive  is used when the object of a sentence is the same as the subjective   myself, herself, oneself  In grammar, a reflexive verb is, loosely, a verb whose direct object is the same as its subject, for example, "I wash myself". More generally, a reflexive verb has the same semantic agent and patient (typically represented syntactically by the subject and the direct object). For example, the English verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself. In a wider sense, the term refers to any verb form whose grammatical object is a reflexive pronoun, regardless of semantics; such verbs are also referred to as pronominal verbs, especially in grammars of the Romance languages. In the Romance languages, the pronominal verbs is a parent category with reflexive verbs as only one of its sub-categories. Other kinds of pronominal verbs are reciprocal (they killed each other), passive (it is told), subjective, idiomatic (the presence of the reflexive pronoun   In her book Splendid Apparel,  Anna writes that her mother worried she thought too much about her knitting and directed her towards more academic pursuits.   Anna was educated at Harvard and taught at MIT but eventually left the academic world of the mind.   She is skeptical of brain oriented knitting and credits the hands for their own intelligence, especially in crafts.   She encourages people to understand their knitting and not just follow the rules.   She’s a bit like Elizabeth Zimmerman in that way.   But Anna also offers detailed instruction on techniques.  The traveling twisted stitch is one of them.  And she’s unvented and adapted a number of other techniques     I’ve edited out a lot of this free wheeling interview although I believe some of you would have enjoyed discussions of feminism and academic politics.   But I wanted to focus on Anna’s journey from the straight lines and head thinking of the academic world to the wandering and explorative world of her hands and her heart.   She is now an Anglican solitary who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and she teaches knitting  at workshops and conferences on the side.    Throughout the recording, I’ll stop and explain what I’ve edited out and where we’ll head next.      I begin by asking her about something she said in class and writes about in her books:  Knitting instructions never used to be written and learned from —They weren’t even spoken and listened to.  They were demonstrated and copied.     Just to expand a bit on hand learning versus mind learning.   Anna writes in her book Magnificent Mittens and Socks:  “About learning, there is one thing to say:   it isn’t easy.  It is always difficult for fingers to learn to do something new.  On the other hand, when they do, they learn it.   They never forget it , unlike the mind which learns easily and forgets quickly.”   BAck to the interview.     Even though I got the gist of what Anna was