Book Review: Unraveling

I have seen a lot of knitters this year reading Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein, and I finally got my hands on a copy and read it recently.

It’s a great book for knitters, crafters of all sorts, women, people with parents and kids and folks trying to make sense of the world we’re living in now.

The subtitle is “What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater,” though if the picture of the sweater on the back of the book is any indication it’s probably definitely not the ugliest sweater (it is a pretty small picture, though).

Orenstein decided during the pandemic that she wanted the sheep to sweater experience, so she found someone to teach her to shear sheep, learned to spin, did numerous dyeing experiments, got help to design a sweater using her DIY yarn and ultimate knit that sweater.

There’s a lot here about the value of making things, whether that thing is yarn or a sweater or a relationship with a family member. When writing about dyeing yarn with an indigo vat (something I’ve wanted to do but am a little afraid to try in my backyard), she talks about the pride of making things without worrying too much about the result.

“I will miss the lightness of a beginner, the freedom from expectation, my sense that any result is ‘good,’: she writes. “‘These are mine,’ I say, smiling to myself, and I know that is all that matters.”

The knitting part is actually a pretty small part of the story. It’s also about the history of craft, where colors come from, fast fashion, climate change, aging and more. I want to recommend it to knitters in particular but I really want to recommend it to everyone, because I think there are insights here that most people will find interesting (not to mention some funny bits, and some sad bits, and there’s a sweater at the end, which is kind of like a happy ending).

If you read it I’d love to hear what you think!

About the book: 224 pages, hardcover, published January 2023 by Harper Collins. Suggested retail $27.99.

Get the book here: Unraveling

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

Have you read?