UNRAVELING
What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater
by Peggy Orenstein
Looking at the world through knitting.
Journalist Orenstein, whose previous subjects include boys, girls, and sex, offers a wry, candid memoir of the year 2020, when the pandemic lockdown, her father’s deepening dementia, her daughter’s upcoming departure for college, and the threat of wildfires to her California home urged her to think hard about her life. At 58, aging, too, was on her mind when she decided to plunge into a new, challenging project: learning to shear a sheep, process the fleece, and knit a sweater. Shearing required courage and brawn, she quickly learned, and the mound of wool she managed to glean was only the beginning of a long process that involved cleaning (fleece was rife with manure, insects, and soil), carding, spinning, and dyeing (making her own dye from leaves and flowers). Spinning involved considerable trial and error, but when she mastered it—“pinching, pulling, smoothing back”—she felt “suffused with well-being, with a profound sense of peace, not dissimilar to the feeling of being lost in writing.” Besides recounting the messy process of creating yarn, Orenstein offers a colorful history of fiber production, the invention and evolution of spinning mechanisms, and even the prevalence of spinning in folk and fairy tales. She was surprised by her discoveries “about how clothing has shaped civilization, class, culture, power,” noting many instances when knitters (those pussy hats!) practiced “craftivism.” She also discovered the environmental impact of clothing production. As she notes, dyeing and finishing are “responsible for a fifth of the world’s industrial water pollution,” and discarded “fast clothing” piles up in landfills. Although at times it felt overwhelming “to parse every purchase, to ensure it supports sustainability and fair working conditions,” the author emerged from her project with a commitment to thinking more consciously about consumption—as well as with new insight into her fears, grief, and apprehension about the future.
A charming memoir of a quietly transformative year.