Don’t be daft.
These are Manx Loghtans;
They’re all that kind of rusty brown – no other colour.
Herdwick lambs are born almost completely black:
Then turn a bright orangey-brown (their head turn white within weeks of birth):
before finally becoming grey around the time of first shearing:
Shetland sheep are every colour possible:
Coburg Fox sheep – born orange, fades to taupe:
Dryesdale – white only:
Jacob sheep, doin’ their own crazy thang since Methuselah was a lad:
Quora linky.
That very much depends on a lot of different factors.
In wild sheep or domesticated self-moulting sheep, the fleece may just lie there and decompose, unless taken by another animal or bird for burrows or nests.
If the sheep is a meat sheep, the fleece is usually of very low quality. Occasionally, it can be sold as insulation material or for industrial carpeting, but it is quite often just dumped and allowed to decompose.
Better-quality fleece can be made into high-quality carpeting, upholstery and soft furnishings; clothing; or yarn for fibre arts – knitting, weaving, etc. In some countries, there is a central processing board to which all such fleece must be sold (e.g., British Wool, in the UK), in others there may be competing processers to which farmers can sell fleece.
Quora linky.
As it happens, the other day I had one of those very common sink-tap accidents which resulted in me being sprayed down the front with water.
That kind of thing, except all over my woolly jumper.
If I’d been wearing almost any other top, I’d have had to change. However, with my woolly pulli, I just brushed off the drops sitting on the surface of the fabric and carried on. Some spray did go right through the fabric and landed on my chest, which was unpleasant, but that water swiftly evaporated with my body heat, right back through the fabric. So I had no excuse but to carry on washing those damn dishes.
This is the kind of thing woollen garments excel in. You can wear your Aran sweater out fishing on a drizzly day, and stay perfectly warm and dry on the inside. Your Melton-weave wool overcoat will see you through moderate to heavy rain, and only require a shake-out on the doorstep when you get home. However, if you fall off the boat into the sea, or are unfortunate enough to walk home in torrential rain, neither is going to help you much (of course, no other fibre will help either – you’re soaked: get changed).
From: Wool fibre structure and properties
The above shows the structure of a single wool ‘hair’. Off the left-most end is the root of the fibre, where it grows out of the skin. For our purposes, the important bits are the Cuticle, and the Cortex.
Cuticle: The outer surface of the fibre is made up of overlapping cuticle cells, or scales. These have a chemically-bonded waxy coating, which repels water. This allows tap-spray and light rainfall to simply run off the fabric.
Cortex: The cortex is made up of two types of cell with different chemical compositions. One type attracts moisture more than the other, and therefore expands more than the other. This difference in expansion causes the fibre to ‘crimp’ (curl). It is the crimp in wool that allows it to trap air pockets, providing insulation. So, a slightly-damp woolly jumper becomes ‘crimpier’ and warmer.
I’ll mention a third region for completeness: the Matrix. This is mostly hydrophilic sulphur-based proteins, which allow wool to absorb up to 30% of its weight in water. If you get thoroughly soaked, this layer fills up, your woolly garment weighs a ton, and it takes forever to dry out. In an emergency, you can try wringing it out and relying on the cortical crimp to – at least – keep you warm, but the waterproof outer cuticle has been subverted. You need to get somewhere warm, with hot food and dry clothes, stat.
Quora linky.
Why not?
Back in the day, undercrackers, especially those worn in winter, were made of fine wool.
Commercial woollen underwear, 1920s.
Wool was a huge, huge industry in most Western countries. We cannot imagine, today, with cheap off-the-peg clothing imports, what the wool industry was like before the 1970s. Think Amazon, think eBay, think Microsoft: that sort of big. Just getting dressed was a major part of life, before you could pop into Primark and come out with a complete wardrobe, including smalls, for £10–20. In my grandparents’ day, it meant going to a tailor for your decent outdoor and winter clothing, purchasing rolls of cotton or linen to sew your summer clothing, and knitting, knitting, knitting in every spare moment to provide yourself and your family with socks, underwear, gloves and other ‘comforts’. For many families, it meant carding and spinning the wool, before knitting. Much of Great Britain’s former wealth, and its Industrial Revolution, was driven by wool.
And so, of course, when sea-bathing became the In thing to do in the Victorian era, the outfits were naturally made of wool – though usually woven flannel fabric, rather than knitted.
This fabric did not sag and expand (much) when wet, and if it did, so what? It just meant it covered up more of the body, which was the point of these cumbersome outfits.
It was only when fashions changed to more skimpy swimsuits that it became apparent that wool, particularly when knitted, wasn’t ideal: the sagging then revealed more than hid.
But there’s no reason to avoid crafting your own swimwear: crocheted cotton is a sturdy fall-back –
and even wool is okay, if you work with its qualities rather than against:
Quora linky.
Foxford Woollen Mills is a weaving mill, producing fabrics, including the fabric for the Garda Síochána uniform. It does not, to my knowledge, prepare and spin woollen yarn.
The company does not provide much information about the original travel rug (car blanket) presented to Gen. Michael Collins, beyond the fact that they used a 4-ply yarn. This is not particularly helpful, as 4-ply yarn today is a very thin yarn that produces a lightweight fabric unsuited to a travel rug. Presumably, the yarn they used was made up of 4 thick strands, plied together to create a rug yarn, closer to an Aran- or Bulky-weight knitting yarn.
While they do not reveal the source for their weaving yarn for Gen. Collins’ rug, given the period, it is likely that it was sourced from a spinning mill in Ireland, possibly but not necessarily in Co Mayo; and that that spinning mill purchased fleece from Irish sources, possibly but not necessarily locally.
Historically, sheep breeds in Ireland were mixed-use – farmed for wool and meat*. With the exception of a couple of breeds, the wool produced was often of relatively poor quality, too rough for anything but outerwear** or carpeting. There was nonetheless a thriving woollen spinning and weaving industry across Ireland, with mills in many towns, particularly market towns where animal marts took place. In Donegal, there was hardly a settlement of any size without a mill. Virtually everybody had a Donegal tweed suit, purchased as a wedding outfit, worn as Sunday best for decades – often picked apart and re-fashioned according to trends – until they were finally buried in it.
This industry was decimated by the mid-20th century. Petroleum-based yarns destroyed the wool-spinning industry, cheap imports from the far east destroyed the knitwear and weaving industry, trends in agriculture towards specialised farming and a lack of political support for the industry meant that, from the 1960s on, these small local mills disappeared. Today, only 3 of these historic spinning mills survive: Donegal Yarns in Kilcar, Co Donegal; Kerry Woollen Mills in Killarney; and Cushendale Woollen Mills in Graignamanagh, Co Kilkenny. The latter two survived by amalgamating weaving and woollen products into their operation, Donegal Yarns through relationships with weaving mills and with international yarn brands such as Debbie Bliss and Lang Yarns.
Generally, weaving mills did better than spinning mills, partly due to the worldwide cachet of Irish tweed and carpeting, and there are still quite a few like Foxford around. But most sheep in Ireland are meat sheep, there’s no marketing support for shorn wool, so there’s virtually no Irish fleece for the spinning mills, and therefore virtually no Irish-grown yarn for the Irish weaving mills. Almost all the wool dyed and spun in Donegal Yarns comes from Australia, via a cleaning operation in Bradford, England.
And that is why Foxford Mills uses Australian wool: because it exists, and Irish wool (almost***) doesn’t.
*: I’m not aware of milk breeds being of much importance until recently.
**: Aran sweaters, while a 20th-century innovation, were outerwear, worn over a good flannel shirt.
***: There are some small-scale efforts to use Irish fleece – Donegal Yarns is working on a range using Wicklow Cheviot fleece, Cushendale Mills processes Irish Zwartble fleece, and Kerry Woollen Mills adds lowland Galway fleece to imported fleece. There’s also a new mini-mill in Cavan, Olann, which will spin small quantities of fleece (the others only accept commercial quantities in tons) which will likely appeal to hobby and rare-breed farmers with only kilos to process; but this won’t supply a large concern like Foxford Mills.
Quora linky.
Because vegans lack common sense, and have no understanding of the natural world.
Their existence is only possible in a post-scarcity Western society, where there are lots of vegan alternatives which are only available by raping and bankrupting developing nations for their avocado toast, cutting down rainforest to grow their monoculture soybeans, and destroying and polluting the environment for their cotton clothing and ocean-destroying plastic ‘leather’.
They need to spend a year or two living on locally-sourced turnips and wearing nettles to knock some damned sense into them.
Quora linky.
It’s not the wool.
Virtually any wool or non-sheep fibre can be used for making socks. Some people like a blend of wool with nylon/polyester/acrylic or cotton for strength and wear. Others like a sturdier fibre like mohair, or breed-specific wool such as Herdwick:
Herdwick ewe with lamb at foot.
Still more prefer worsted-spun over woollen-spun, or an unbalanced ply over balanced. Then there are the arguments over yarn weight, between the die-hard fingering-weight knitters, the never-anything-but sportweighters, and the worsted warriors.
And superwash wool is a must if you’re planning to machine-wash your socks – or even if they need vigorous handwashing.
But beyond such matters, there’s a deeper issue; a philosophy, as it were, of socks.
I’m a worsted warrior, and I like Novita 7 Veljestä wool right now. I will happily use pure wool Aran mill-ends, too, especially for kilt hose – you can get these directly from your nearest spinning mill, or they might have a local shop outlet. They’re on cones, from 500g upwards. I also have a 4kg cone of Herdwick, which I’ll probably be buried with, even though I have made multiple items from it. It just never seems to get any smaller.
Quora linky.
It’s very unlikely that you would ever find out.
The majority of sheep in Ireland are meat breeds. Their wool is poor quality, and usually goes into landfill.
Therefore, there is no Irish yarn to make into egg cozies, much less sweaters.
Most of the (very, very tiny amount of) yarn produced in Ireland is made from Australian merino. That’s not scratchy* in the slightest.
There is some (an incredibly tiny, miniscule amount) wool currently spun from Irish sheep, principally Zwartblés but including some other breeds including the rare-breed native Galway Longwool. However, this is usually only spun in fingering weight, for making socks. You can make a sweater out of sock wool, but it will take years and will only be suitable for hot summers.
Quora linky.
Hmmm…
Are you sure you mean Melton wool?
Because Melton wool isn’t soft. It’s actually quite hard, stiff, rigid, tough, thick, dense – take your pick. It’s the fabric used for weatherproof overcoats and upholstery for its toughness and robust wearing characteristics.
It’s primarily a twill-woven fabric, which means it should drape and fold well. Then, it is fulled – pounded and agitated, causing the microscopic scales on individual wool fibres to attach to each other, resulting in a thicker, shrunken fabric*. Finally, the surface is napped – brushed to a fluffy, velvetty texture – and then shaved to remove these loose fibres.
I suppose one could say that Melton has a “soft” surface – like a low-pile corduroy, perhaps. But it is not what I would consider remotely comfortable or skin-kind. I certainly wouldn’t want to wear Melton next to my skin, like the handknit Blue-Faced Leicester wool sweater I’m currently wearing – and I absolutely wouldn’t consider it for underwear, as I would a fine merino or Wensleydale.
*: Felting achieves the same aim, but, technically, felt is made with fleece, whereas fulled fabrics are woven or knitted first.
Quora linky.
No.
Angora wool comes from the Angora rabbit, of which there are several breeds. All Angora rabbits are large, some startlingly so:
Their wool grows to about 3″ (7.5cm), though some can be up to 5″ (12.5cm).
This naturally falls out every 90 days, although some owners trim their bunnies regularly:
The main reason for keeping Angora rabbits is not for their wool – it’s for competitions. After competing for a year or two, they’re retired, often becoming pets as they are very used to being handled. They’re terrific fun, a mix of dog-like rascality and cat-like snuggles.
Their wool is harvested through regular brushing, moulting, or trimming. It’s actually possible to spin directly from a bun in moult:
As long as it’s moulting, it will happily sit there and let you. If it isn’t moulting, you can expect a surprisingly painful kick in the stomach. These are not coot widdle bunnikins, they can and will draw blood.
Most owners, however, will collect wool from brushings:
Now, a number of people have mentioned PETA. It may be true that some Chinese Angora farms have poor animal protections in place, and that abuse took place. I deal with that by never buying Angora from China, or from anywhere that is even slightly suspicious – but I do that for any fibre*. However, I would like to direct you to this website, and, when you have examined it in full, I would like you to think about whether PETA is the sort of organisation from which to get your information on animal abuse.
*: this means that I only work with substandard cashmere, for example, because the truly high-quality cashmere comes from half-starved wild goats. Starvation is the reason for the ultra-fine fibre these goats produce. NB: they’re not deliberately starved. It’s because their native environment (mountain grassland) doesn’t produce enough food. Cashmere goats living in, e.g., Australia or Scotland, are well-fed, and therefore produce thicker cashmere fibre.
Quora linky.
thornmaiden.com 