The key ideas

Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater

Peggy Orenstein, 2023

During the pandemic, a journalist decides to make a sweater from scratch: she shears a sheep, processes the fleece, and spins and dyes yarn herself. A year of slow handwork becomes a conversation about her late mother, her father with dementia, fast fashion, and changes sweeping away entire industries. You will learn why craft soothes, how it connects generations, and what to do when words no longer help.

Who it is for

For anyone seeking steadiness in anxious times, enjoying making things by hand, or facing parents’ aging and loss. And for anyone wanting to understand what the clothes in their wardrobe cost the planet.

Why the hell didn’t I stop at sourdough bread?

The sheep slips and the clippers buzz

A sheep does not look slippery. But its fleece is soaked in lanolin, the natural wax protecting wool from weather, and holding the animal is extremely difficult. Weighing around seventy kilograms, it lies on its back, pushes against Peggy Orenstein’s legs, and wriggles like a buttered toddler, only with hooves. Electric clippers buzz in her right hand, their blades unguarded: they could cut off a finger or sever a major artery in the sheep. Her back aches, and breathing under the mask is difficult. One thought fills her mind: why the hell couldn’t she have stopped at sourdough bread?

In January 2020, American journalist Orenstein published a book about boys and spoke in a new city every day. During the tour, a friend texted “Covid-19!” Peggy had no idea what it meant. A couple of months later, life ground to a halt.

She decided to make a sweater from scratch: shear a sheep herself, process the fleece, spin and dye the yarn, then knit. It was meant merely to distract her from anxiety. Instead, the project revealed how clothes shaped history, power, and climate, what women’s work means, and how working with yarn can untangle the knots of your life.

Seven stories from that year follow, each about what slow handwork can offer when the world around you shakes.

The world will not obey, but stitches will

Recall the pandemic’s first weeks. Orenstein describes them honestly. She read the news nonstop, then not at all, cycling through this for weeks. She compiled a great-books list for her sixteen-year-old daughter in case school did not reopen. Her daughter refused, and Peggy gave in, dropping all phone restrictions. The daughter disappeared into the feed, followed by her mother.

Only one thing soothed her: the rhythm of hands and needles while knitting on the sofa before the television. She could not control the world, but she could control this. Wrap the yarn, pull a loop through, count stitches, add a row. Knitters like to point out that repeated movement works like meditation or yoga, lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones. Added to this is the ancient joy of turning raw material into something useful and, with luck, beautiful.

Orenstein is not sentimental about the craft trend, however. She observes that those taking up breadmaking and knitting were safe, the “worried well.” Skills once essential for survival became attractive social media images of self-sufficiency.

A simple rule follows from her story: when the large things are beyond your control, give your hands a small task that responds.

Read in Livria

About the author

Peggy Orenstein is an American journalist and author of the bestsellers Girls & Sex and Boys & Sex about girls and boys. She writes for The New York Times and lives in Northern California.

All books by this author: Peggy Orenstein

Terms from the book

  • dementia
  • Grimm
  • Fleece: The wool removed from a sheep in one whole layer, or the wool still on the animal.
  • Lanolin: Wool wax, a fat-like substance secreted by sheep’s skin. It protects wool from moisture and is used in creams and lip balms.
  • Synthetics: Fabrics and fibers made chemically rather than from wool, cotton, or flax.
  • Nylon: A synthetic fiber made from petroleum products. It is used in tights, jackets, and backpacks.
  • Polyester: The most widespread synthetic fiber, essentially plastic made from oil.
  • Lycra: The brand name of an elastic synthetic fiber added to fabric to make it stretch.
  • Shein: An ultrafast-fashion online retailer founded in China that releases thousands of new clothing designs daily.
  • Boohoo: A British online retailer of cheap fashionable clothing and an ultrafast-fashion company.
  • Microfibers: Tiny synthetic threads shed by clothes during washing and carried into water and the ocean.
  • Cochineal: Small insects living on cacti in Mexico and Central America. Dried females yield the red dye carmine.
  • Carmine: A vivid, lasting red dye from cochineal insects, still used in cosmetics and foods.
  • Mauveine: The first synthetic purple dye, discovered accidentally in nineteenth-century London. It began chemical fabric dyeing.
  • Barry: Lynda Barry, an American cartoonist and writer who teaches drawing and writing without fear of judgment.
  • Beghetto: Ronald Beghetto, an American educational psychologist studying creativity in children and adults.
  • Spinster: An English word now meaning an unmarried older woman that originally meant a woman who spins.
  • Thunberg: Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist who began a school strike for climate action as a teenager.
  • González: X González, a prominent voice in the US gun-control movement that followed the 2018 Parkland school shooting.
  • Parkland: A Florida city where a former pupil shot and killed seventeen people at a school in 2018.
  • Yousafzai: Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist for girls’ education and youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
  • Trench foot: Severe foot damage from prolonged exposure to cold and damp, common among First World War soldiers in trenches.
  • Pussyhats: Pink knitted hats with cat ears, a symbol of US women’s protest marches in 2017.
  • Craftivism: Combining craft and activism, using knitting or embroidery to draw attention to an issue.
  • Carding: Combing wool with two fine-toothed brushes to align the fibers for spinning.
  • FaceTime: Apple’s video-calling application.
  • Twins: The Minnesota Twins, a professional baseball team from Minneapolis.

All terms

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