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

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:51.0	There are many different ways to describe what Peggy Ornstein's new book
0:54.3	Unravelling is about. It's the story of how to make a sweater from scratch with all the
0:59.7	writerly scenes and well-placed facts, and it's also a meditation on growing older, on what
1:05.4	home is or can be, and on the interwoven pleasures and dangers of Northern California life,
1:10.8	and it's an argument for the neglected importance of textiles
1:14.2	as a driver of global history, cotton, colonialism, industrialization.
1:18.9	Through it all, Ornstein follows the golden thread of what it is to be a woman today,
1:22.8	what it was long ago, and what it might be for her daughter who's leaving home.
1:26.4	We'll talk knitting and life
	...

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