Shearing a wary and slippery sheep with a sharp electric blade

"It's not surprising that interest in crafts like knitting surged during the pandemic: Soothing, repetitive activities have a way of keeping anxiety at bay. Shearing a wary and slippery sheep with a sharp electric blade, on the other hand, might be expected to induce, rather than alleviate, anxiety in someone new to the experience. But that's what Peggy Orenstein found herself doing once she decided that her Covid project would be to create a sweater entirely from the source. She documents the process in "Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater."

"I'd long dreamed, for reasons that, much as my editor would like me to, I can't fully explain, of making a garment from scratch," Ms. Orenstein, a knitter since childhood, writes at the outset. Could one reason have been that the undertaking would make a decent hook for a memoir? While it's unclear at what point she decided that her adventure warranted a book, a whiff of contrivance can be forgiven thanks to the charming and affecting result.

The book's chapters are organized around the various steps involved in the garment's creation. The first is also the most dramatic: Ms. Orenstein is bruised and bloodied by the time she's done with the physically arduous sheep-shearing. With ample wool in hand, she proceeds to clean the raw fleece, spin and dye the yarn, and, finally, pick up the needles to knit the end product.

Ms. Orenstein, a journalist whose previous books include 2011's "Cinderella Ate My Daughter," a look at the marketing of "princess culture" to young girls, has an infectious curiosity about each of these tasks. She delves into their histories and interviews their modern-day practitioners, whose numbers are dwindling in the face of automation and the replacement of natural fibers and dyes with synthetics. (Referring to polyester outerwear as "fleece," she notes wryly, is "a triumph of Orwellian marketing.")

Her immersion in the slow production of one garment propels the author to consider, by comparison, the processes involved in the mass manufacturing of clothing and the billions of plastic microfibers washed into the oceans yearly from the laundering of synthetics. With her growing awareness of the pollution caused by disposable clothing, she wonders why she doesn't think of what she wears the way she thinks of what she eats: "trying to buy locally, organically, ever conscious of environmental ramifications, of the treatment in its production of both humans and animals." Persuading consumers to give up fast fashion for pricier but longer-lasting items of apparel seems like a pipe dream, she acknowledges. But she points out that buying organic produce was once a fringe activity too.

The book's title refers less to yarn than to Ms. Orenstein's sense during the pandemic that her life is, in a word, unraveling. Counting herself among the "worried well," she recognizes that she's financially stable and at no immediate risk of illness. But staring down her 60th birthday, grieving the death of her mother, watching from a Covid-imposed distance as her elderly father slips into dementia, and preparing for her only child's departure for college, she is anxious and uncertain about her next stage. The pandemic has confined her to home, but the ever-present danger of fires in her Northern California neighborhood makes home itself feel unsafe.

These concerns are elegantly threaded throughout the book and its meticulous tracing of the various stages of transformation from sheep to sweater. Preparing the fleece itself takes weeks: After washing the raw wool, Ms. Orenstein uses carding brushes to remove any lingering debris. Only small amounts of fiber can be carded at a time. Afterward, they're rolled into cigar-shaped puffs called rolags that are ready for spinning, and she'll need hundreds to create a sweater.

She falls into the habit of calling her father in Minneapolis for video chats while she undertakes the tedious work of carding. Their relationship had always been uneasy, but dementia has softened him, and they develop a comfortable routine during these long, companionable calls. He even tells her, for the first time, that he loves her. "As the days crawl by, I feel increasingly privileged to have the time with him, time to weave our relationship more tightly together," she writes. "I move the carding paddles back and forth, back and forth, piling up the rolags in a basket at my feet. I am almost sorry when I am finally done."

Small instances of grace like these are more compelling than the author's efforts to find universal relevance in her endeavor. In a section examining the prevalence of spinningin fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty -- whose protagonist, Briar Rose, falls into her century-long slumber after pricking her finger on a spinning wheel's spindle -- Ms. Orenstein states, "We are all Briar Rose, asleep to something, whether individually or collectively." Such pronouncements feel strained.

In addition, since the stakes of her project are self-imposed and, frankly, rather low, Ms. Orenstein's expressions of frustration can be tiresome. "Why the hell couldn't I have stuck to sourdough?" she asks at one point. "Everything already feels so hard in the middle of a pandemic," she observes at another. "Why am I trying to do something even harder?" More interesting is her realization that she takes pleasure in the rare experience of being an amateur, even an incompetent one, without any pressure to excel.

By book's end, Ms. Orenstein has knit a boxy, striped sweater that, at nearly three pounds, is remarkably heavy. "Maybe the weightiness is appropriate," she notes. "It is, after all, carrying a lot. . . . This whole damned year." As a garment, she admits, it betrays its maker's lack of expertise, though the claim that it qualifies as the "world's ugliest" (there is a photo on the book's jacket) seems like a stretch. But even if the sweater itself is ugly, its creation yielded some lovely moments.

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Ms. Spindel's book reviews appear in the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere." [1]

1. Shear Obsession
Spindel, Barbara.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 26 Jan 2023: A.15