From Clara Parkes’ The Yarn Whisperer:

Things, too, come unraveled. Hems, marriages, businesses, economies, and entire nations alike have met equally dramatic demises. There’s not much positive imagery associated with the word unravel. Look it up in the dictionary, and you’ll see definitions like “to come undone” or “to fail.”…

Coming unraveled may connote losing it, but sometimes it’s best to acknowledge with quite a level head that something you thought was right isn’t, that you need to undo as best you can and rebuild. In life, you can’t start from scratch as a baby and relive your days differently. But in knitting — most knitting anyway — you can. If you’re patient, you can pull your yarn out of whatever mess you may have gotten it into. You can hit “rewind,” literally rewinding the yarn back to its beginning…

…Therein lies the mystery of unraveling. Dig a little deeper in the dictionary, and you’ll notice that unravel also means to loosen, to disentangle, or to solve, as when Miss Marple unraveled the mystery of the body in the library. We may be physically undoing one thing, but we’re solving something bigger. We’re untangling a problem, loosening a situation that may have become too tight, too restrictive to our creativity. It’s not all bad; in fact quite the opposite. Unraveling can be a blessing.

As we’re doing all that hard work, we’re also wiping the slate clean, resetting the odometer. We’re another day older and wiser, with a ball of slightly kinked but perfectly good yarn to show for it. If we’re lucky, we have a greater sense of perspective on what got us into this mess in the first place and how we can avoid it next time.