Month: June 2019

Why is synthetic wool better than natural wool?

It isn’t.

Synthetic yarn (NB: NOT ‘wool’) is sometimes cheaper, and some people with allergies to wool or lanolin find it safer to wear next to the skin. Vegans also tend to prefer it.

There are two basic types of synthetic yarn: petroleum-based, such as acrylic or nylon, and plant-based, such as rayon or cellulose.

Petroleum-based yarns, as you might imagine, are not eco-friendly or renewable. They are often flammable if not treated with kemikalzzzz, melting onto your skin. Every time they are washed, they lose tiny microfibres which make their way into the oceans, just like those banned micro-beads in cleansers. Plus, being basically plastic, they degrade like plastic bags: good news for archaeologists, not so good for the environment.

Plant-based fibres will bio-degrade, but the process of creating them can be polluting. For most, the process involves blending the plant material into slush and extruding a thin fibre from that slush, which uses electricity. The process also involves the dreaded kemikalzzz, some of which are genuinely nasty. There’s also significant waste which needs to be dealt with, preferably not by dumping it in a nearby river, which does happen too.

Other, more ‘natural’ plant fibres are not much better. Cotton is famously bad for the environment, both in the growing and the processing. Linen requires the flax plant to be rotted under water for a period of time, then washed repeatedly to extract the phloem (IIRC: it might be xylem, or both). On my family farm, there is a stream-fed pond we call the linsteep, where my ancestors performed this task. It’s now an amusement park for our ducks, and a handy watering-hole for our cattle, but when it was in use, we – and our down-stream neighbours – had to drive our animals to other water sources. The process for making hemp yarn was similar.

Wool is renewable, bio-degradable, non-flammable, need not use the genuinely nastier chemicals in processing (check out the suint method – the residue can be used as a natural fertiliser, which apparently works wonders on tomatoes), all while the sheep mows and fertilises your lawn, provides milk which can be made into ice cream, lanolin for your beauty products, and in the end cuddly sheepskins and yummy meat. Plus, wool is warmer, waterproof, dyes easily with no more than food colouring and vinegar, and when you’re bored with your sweater, you can felt it into pot-holders or cushion covers, or cut it up without unravelling to patch other clothes or make new ones:

Katwise Rainbow Magic coat, made from recycled wool sweaters.

Quora linky.

How easy is it to make “wool” out of pet hair?

Not hard at all. The only thing you need is the right kind of pet.

So goldfish and budgies are right out.

The best pets are the fluffy ones – the ones that grow a decent undercoat in winter. Huskies are good, and so are long-hair cats like Maine Coons. Also, Angora bunnies, and some lionheads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some guinea pigs and ferrets didn’t produce small, usable amounts of undercoat.

The fluff can be collected through normal grooming. Keep it in a clean, sealable plastic bag until you have enough. When you have about 100g/4oz, you can try removing the hairs from the fluff, wash (if you don’t like spinning “in the grease”) and card, and spin.

This first spinning effort will tell you whether the fluff is worth spinning on its own – some of it may be too short – or whether you’d be better combining it with a longer fibre, like wool or cotton.

Here’s some people who made clothing from their dogs’ hair:

Two women in dog-hair cardigans, with their dogs - a Tibetan mastiff and a husky. I think - I'm not great on dog breeds.
Aman in a cabled dog-hair sweater, with a large hairy mongrel (probably).
A woman in a dark-brown dog-hair gilet, with rough collie who is too light-coloured to be the dog-hair donor.
A man in a bright white Aran-style cabled cardigan, with a beautiful white husky.
A woman wearing a black stole which looks like Persian or Astrakhan lambswool, but which clearly comes from her huge Royal poodle.

These People Are Wearing Sweaters Made From Their Dog’s Shed Hair

There’s even a company – Knit Your Dog – that will do the hard work for you, if you’re not crafty:

And a woman who works exclusive with dog har, and writes about it:

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The main problem with cat hair is there’s comparatively little of it. I’ve only really heard of people felting with cat hair:

Crafting with Cat Hair: Cute to Make with Your Cat

Angora bunnies produce Angora wool, that fluffy, soft stuff that makes gorgeous, expensive sweaters, so that’s pretty mainstream and commercial. However, here’s a video of a woman who keeps Angora rabbits (and poodles), showing the process of producing items from bunny to needle, which would be the same for any other animal fibre:

Quora linky.