‘Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater’
By Peggy Orenstein
(195 pages, Adult Non-fiction, 2023)
We all know that during the COVID lockdowns people took up various hobbies, like baking bread. Peggy Orenstein took an extreme approach: already a knitter she decided to knit a sweater from wool she sheared, carded, spun, dyed, designed and knitted herself. As you can imagine, it was quite a project.
Unraveling is both the story of that project and also a meditation on modern life, lockdown, aging parents, facing an empty nest and more. Living in Northern California, about as far from her childhood in Minnesota as she could get without leaving the USA, she has to work at maintaining the tie with her father in assisted living back home. Coping with Zoom high school, she’s also wondering about the next stage in her life, when her daughter leaves for college. Struggling to spin decent yarn from the imperfectly sheared fleece, she thinks about fast fashion and the challenge of sustainable production.
I enjoyed the whole story, both the snarky moments and the poignant ones. The recent pandemic left a mark on us all, and gave us more time to think than most of us are used to these days. At the same time, the many issues that Orenstein faces are in front of all of us: aging parents, changes in our lifestyles, trying to live more mindfully. I don’t knit and I’m certainly not planning to ever shear a sheep, but I came away from the book with respect for Orenstein’s project and an incentive to think a little harder about my own life.
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Julia Miller
