Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein

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I recently read Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein after borrowing it from the library.

The book, whose subline is ‘What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater,’ follows the author’s journey through learning ‘essential skills for the apocalypse’ during pandemic lockdowns. This entails all the skills needed to make a finished garment, from getting the raw material to binding off. She learned how to shear a sheep and how to scour the wool. Then she learned how to card the wool into rolags and learned how to spin the rolags into yarn. Afterwards, she learned how to dye the wool using natural dyestuffs found in her vicinity. Lastly, she designed her own sweater and knit it up.

In the last several years, I have read many books about shepherding, shearing, knitting, and textile history. After all that reading, I found this book covered a lot of the same topics and informative tidbits. It included a lot of similar information on types of fabric and their histories as from The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair (which I’ve read twice). Also Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World by Victoria Finlay (which I’m currently reading), covered much of the same topics but in much more detail. Fabric also covered different types of fabrics from throughout the world, from barkcloth to silk.

Author Peggy Orenstein also mentions the natural dye expert Jenny Dean (whose book Wild Color I used to dye my Deren Cardigan). Orenstein used some of Dean’s expertise to dye yarn for her sweater. Unraveling also reminded me of the books Follow the Flock: How Sheep Shaped Human Civilization by Sally Coulthard and This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain’s Knitted History by Esther Rutter, both of which focus on wool.

Some topics seemed repetitive after all the other books that I’ve read recently. Many of the books reflect on the environmental impact of fast fashion and synthetic fibres. They also cover terrible working conditions in textile mills throughout history. Several of the books cover the history and mythology of textiles, including folk and fairy tales. Spinning is covered in the stories of Rumpelstiltskin and Sleeping Beauty. Many of the books also reference the three fates (or Moirai) from Greek mythology, including Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The books also write about a ‘clew’ being a ball of string from Ariadne that Theseus follows out of the labyrinth. This ‘clew’ is the source of our current English word ‘clue.’

What makes this book different than the others is that the author sees all this textile work through a gender lens. This is not surprising, given the topics of her several other books. Her other books seem to not have any relation to fibre arts and wool. However, this book seemed more of a personal journey than academic text.

Reading about Peggy’s journey to learn shearing reminded me about the similar shearing story as from Raw Material: Working Wool in the West by Stephany Wilkes. Wilkes, who is thanked in the acknowledgements, attended a shearing school in California and became a sheep shearer. Orenstein just sheared enough to make a sweater out of her fleece.

Peggy learns handspinning from Kristine Vejar from A Verb for Keeping Warm. She also refers to what the shop name actually means. This was the first time I’ve learned the back story even though I’ve heard about the shop Verb for years.

The author is located in the Bay Area in California. She is located quite centrally to a lot of the American wool industry. She has relatively easy access to sheep ranches, processors, and fibre artists. I would love to do the same project, making my own sweater from sheep to finished garment.

The book was a quick and entertaining read. However, the book describes ‘the world’s ugliest sweater’ but only shows a picture on the back cover. I would have appreciated more photos of her progress throughout the book.

Get Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein from your local library or local bookshop.