Category Archives: Book Review

I do like a book about knitting, emotional stuff, not instructions (although I like those as well). I think I came across this while looking at what else people bought when they bought Knitting Pearls (by Ann Hood) on Amazon.

Here’s the blurb …

In this lively, funny memoir, Peggy Orenstein sets out to make a sweater from scratch–shearing, spinning, dyeing wool–and in the process discovers how we find our deepest selves through craft. Orenstein spins a yarn that will appeal to everyone.

The Covid pandemic propelled many people to change their lives in ways large and small. Some adopted puppies. Others stress-baked. Peggy Orenstein, a lifelong knitter, went just a little further. To keep herself engaged and cope with a series of seismic shifts in family life, she set out to make a garment from the ground up: learning to shear sheep, spin and dye yarn, then knitting herself a sweater.

Orenstein hoped the project would help her process not just wool but her grief over the recent death of her mother and the decline of her dad, the impending departure of her college-bound daughter, and other thorny issues of aging as a woman in a culture that by turns ignores and disdains them. What she didn’t expect was a journey into some of the major issues of our time: climate anxiety, racial justice, women’s rights, the impact of technology, sustainability, and, ultimately, the meaning of home.

With her wry voice, sharp intelligence, and exuberant honesty, Orenstein shares her year-long journey as daughter, wife, mother, writer, and maker–and teaches us all something about creativity and connection.

I really enjoyed reading this – some chapters more than others (I was not so keen on the shearing chapter). I have put in a multiple of post-it flags and now I want to reread Women’s Work: The First 20 000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.

Learning to shear sheep during the pandemic seemed like a bit of a lark – a way to tap into the romance and resilience of an earlier age; to connect with something enduring when life had become so precarious […]

We are not a culture, to say the least, that venerates older women.

Lessons on food or thread weave us together across the warp of time, the weft of space.

I didn’t imagine how these ancient skills would deepen my awareness of women’s work or challenge my sense of place or home.

It makes sense to me that the designers of life would be female rather than male, as in the Judea-Christian tradition, and it seems especially appropriate that those goddesses would spin. Making something from nothing is the quintessential magic of women.

Craft can mean so many things depending on the context. It can be exploitative or liberatory, subsistence or luxury, rote or creative, an act of conformity or rebellion, of belonging or individuality.

After all, that proverbial ‘little old lady’ could well be an unrepentant cackler, a fearsome crone. Her innocuousness could be her superpower, allowing her to slip the bonds of feminine constraint.

This book is a memoir, a history and a feminist treatise. Even if you’re not a knitter, or into fibre arts, these is plenty to enjoy.

One thing though, I would have liked to have seen the jumper.