Crafty words

So my friend Melinda encouraged me to join Ravelry.com. They have a profile page, which will feed in anything you've written to your blog; so I've figured I'm obliged to write a self-referential or intentionally circular blog posting about the relationship between the philologist self and the knitting and crafting self. I've always been crafty--one of my happiest memories was the faux sky I painted on my closet door in the first apartment I had all to myself. Moreover, I faux marbled cardboard bookshelves that lined my walls. Essentially, I've always enjoyed spreading paint, glue, and other substances all over everything I could get my hands on. But paper crafts require scissors, glues, paints, and powders, all of which are intrinsically incompatible with an infant or toddler.

Not that knitting needles are necessarily safer--but they are easier to control and deflect away from eyes, ears, and other areas--so I've taken up knitting to fill my fidgeting hours. But I was thinking of the rich vocabulary that comes along with all these hobbies. Each activity has its own jargon, some more ridiculous than others. I'm fascinated that this knitting website has revived, or assisted in reviving a somewhat archaic term. A "ravel" from the Dutch word, rafel, according to the OED, originally meant a " A tangle, complication, entanglement; a cluster." Meanings soon seem to distinguish themselves into the attributions of such a cluster, such as a "loose thread." Since "ravel" appears to come from a Dutch weaving term meaning to "unweave," I'm truly perplexed why we would need "unravel" at all.

At least I was perplexed until I figured out that the Dutch prefix 'ont-', which the OED suggests appears in the Dutch source of unravel, ontrafelen, does not only suggest reversal, but a sense of irreversibleness. Therefore, a weaver who was to have ontrafelen a textile would be unable to do it again--presumably because the textile would have ceased to exist.

Now my question is this: have folks back-formed a word "ravel" to suggest the putting together of textiles, or are they simply acknowledging the fact that any knitter, especially a comparatively new knitter such as I, spends a great deal of time repetitively knitting and unknitting the same garment until satisfied with the result? I shall ask and report back my findings.