What Making A Sweater From Scratch — From Shearing to Knitting — Can Teach Us About Life

KQED's Forum

A couple of years ago, penned in by the pandemic, writer Peggy Orenstein “felt an inexplicable, unquenchable urge to confront a large animal while wielding a razor-sharp, juddering clipper; shear off its fleece; and figure out how to make it into a sweater.” Her new memoir, “Unraveling,” tells the story of that journey – from shearing a sheep named Martha and spinning and dyeing her wool, to designing and knitting that sweater. Woven through, Orenstein reckons with the environmental and cultural toll of the textile industry, the history of women’s work, the evolution of fairy tales and her own midlife change and loss.

Guests:

Peggy Orenstein, author, "Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater," "Boys and Sex," "Girls and Sex" and "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture"