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I love crafting memoirs — Alanna Okun’s The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater, Kelly Williams Brown’s Easy Crafts for the Insane, and Sutton Foster’s Hooked are all faves — so when @peak_reads recommended Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein, I knew I had to pick it up. When I went to log the book on Goodreads and StoryGraph, I noticed some reviewers critiqued Orenstein’s privilege and inaccuracies in the text; while I get where those readers are coming from, it didn’t bother me, perhaps because memoir is inherently a flawed genre. If you’re looking for a comprehensive history, this ain’t it. But it doesn’t claim to be. This is the story of a woman making something when nothing made sense. While fellow crafters will find themselves amused by her self depreciating ventures, I was equally engaged by her exploration of the ways in which our language and culture are tied (lol, pun intended) to fiber arts, and moved by her grief in the wake of tragedies both global (the pandemic and California wildfires) and personal (her mother’s death and her father’s decline). Unraveling is a quick read and one I can see myself recommending to fellow crafters! I enjoyed the audio, narrated by the author, while crocheting one of my current WIPs, pictured! 📸: A kindle displaying the ebook of Unraveling lays on two partially finished crochet projects in different shades of blue. via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C6oL-x-LQwJ/