I have some book recommendations for you. This post was going to be about one book which just came out, Unraveling: What I Learned about Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein. (It is clearly NOT the world’s ugliest sweater.)
And then just as I finished reading the book, I saw this marvelous review by Jillian Moreno on Modern Daily Knitting. And right then I decided I would let Jillian tell you about Unraveling and I would give you a list of my favorite books that tell stories about wool. I love every one of these books, have read them all more than once, and will likely read them again (okay, I haven’t read Peggy’s book a second time yet, but I just finished it… give me a few months). They’re all written by masterful writers in story-form. They’ll grab your attention and maybe even make you laugh or cry a little.
English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks
I love Rebanks’ writing. His first book, The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District should be the next one you pick up after you read this one. Also for you Americans, English Pastoral was “translated” to “American” and retitled Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey. I try to purchase books by English authors in their original language wherever possible, so maybe get this one from a UK bookseller?
Rebanks is a farmer in the Lake District of England. He raises Herdwick sheep among other livestock. The book is a story of how he and his family have adapted their farming practices to better support the land long term and to improve farming practices in his neighborhood, in the UK, and by extension not least through this book, our world.
“The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue.”
All of the books I’m talking about here examine an aspect of the land, farming, sheep or other animal husbandry, carbon sequestration, and either overtly or by extension, how what we buy influences the state of our world. We can make a difference if we just pay attention to how to make the world a better place. We could start by using and wearing wool.
Raw Material: Working Wool in the West by Stephany Wilkes
I reviewed this book on the blog HERE. Stephany had a whole career in tech before becoming a professional sheep shearer and advocate for the wool industry.
Stephany describes her new life as a sheep shearer and she also talks about making and how important it is to be connected to the things we use every day: our environment. In the quote below she is talking about her shearing class.
“Each of us is curious about why other people are here. Who else is crazy enough to spend an entire week learning a dirty, old-fashioned skill in a struggling industry? Who else wants to share a world with other dying, esoteric practices like book binding and thatched roof construction? Even our instructors can’t explain why they’ve continued to shear, offering only vague remarks like “It gets under your skin” or “Shearing gets in your blood. We call it wooly worms.””
The work the people in these books are doing is hard and dirty. Caring for animals, shearing sheep, and spending the time to ask the questions that might help humanity mitigate climate change are addressed in these volumes. Some of the authors like Peggy Orenstein probably won’t become a professional sheep shearer, but others like Stephany Wilkes will. All of them care deeply about the world and believe we can make a better planet for all humanity in part through sheep. And I’d say that tapestry weaving fits right into the “esoteric practices” Stephany is mentioning here.
Vanishing Fleece by Clara Parkes
If you have not read Vanishing Fleece and you are any sort of wool yarn user, go get it straight away. Heck, all humans should read this book because wool is warm (and also, interestingly, cool), wears well, is continually being grown by sheep all over the world (who HAVE to be shorn, so if we don’t use the wool it is wasted), can help sequester carbon, allow us to use a fiber that is helping the environment instead of hurting it, and is just darn beautiful. Clara’s adventure with a huge bale of wool is not to be missed. She follows the trail of wool production from that bale through shepherds, shearing, scouring, milling, and using the wool. I reviewed this book in full HERE in case you need further proof that it should be read.
“If we want to be able to make wool socks or sweaters or suits or, yes, yarns, domestically and at prices that are even remotely affordable to the average consumer (and if we want jobs that will allow the average consumer to afford these goods), we need this infrastructure to remain healthy. Whether it’s shepherding or shearing or scouring or spinning, or dyeing, I keep coming back to the fact that each of these links in our chain is in peril.”
Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein
And so we come back to Unraveling. Peggy is a prolific author who found her calendar empty when the pandemic started and decided she would fill her time by learning the steps to make a sweater starting with the shearing the sheep.
She tells the story of finding someone to teach her to shear, the sweaty hard work of shearing Martha, her experiments with spinning and dyeing the fleece, and then her work to design and knit a sweater from it. Woven through the story are her thoughts about why it is important to use wool, how the textile industry impacts the earth, and just maybe how we can be part of turning things around.
The book is really fun to read with a quick, witty writing style and references to people you probably know or at least follow online.
“I didn’t anticipate that this quirky little project would reflect the social justice reckonings of the moment, or that making yarn would help me untangle the knots of my own life. All I knew was that while everyone else was stress-baking and doomscrolling, I 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.”
What are your favorite wool-themed books? There are more out there but when I thought about my favorite sheep and farming books, these were the ones that I immediately wanted to read again. Let us know what your favorites are in the comments.
Your weekend reads for the next few weeks are ready to go! You can find all four books in my recommendations page at bookshop.org HERE. Or check your local library and if they don’t have these books, ask them to purchase them!