Category: Wool

What’s your favorite non-wool yarn when knitting for folks who are allergic?

Most people who claim to be allergic to wool have simply been wearing (or were forced to wear) wool that is not fit for purpose.

Wool comes in many qualities, from soft enough for baby skin (e.g., most merino, Blue-faced Leicester, Wensleydale) to fire- and chemical-resistant industrial carpeting. Historically, people wore underwear in the softer wools,

Model wearing an Aran bodysuit and a tasseled stole in a super-bulky weight yarn

and outerwear in progressively rougher wool, up to Melton fulled twill for weather-resistant coats. Even then, there were differences: trousers or skirts for indoor wear were typically in softer wool, and usually worsted-spun*; outdoor clothing was more usually in sturdier, coarser wools, often blended with mohair, woollen-spun*, and ideally should be lined if you’re not wearing your merino long-johns or cotton petticoat underneath.

In addition, a lot of these ‘wool allergies’ come from a time when wool blends became A Thing because (1) the wool industry was going into decline and (2) more people had washing machines and wanted to wash their woollens in them. So your granny couldn’t afford the quality wool when she was knitting your school jumpers, and used a crappy wool blend with scratchy plastic in it, the washing machine battered the crap out of it, part-felted it á la Melton – and you blamed the wool.

So, the simplest solution for people who find wool scratchy – apart from buying better-quality woollen goods – is to wear something else next to the skin, such as a shirt under Granny’s Christmas sweater that she knitted specially for you with her crippled, arthritic hands, you ungrateful brat. Or you can try ‘superwash’ wool, which has the sticky-outy scales on each fibre chemically stripped off, which means it won’t felt, and isn’t (as) scratchy.

However some people are allergic to lanolin, the natural grease in wool. This is a pretty serious issue, as lanolin is the skin-softening ingredient in many lotions and moisturisers, and finds its way into soaps and makeup too.

To my knowledge, only sheep’s wool contains lanolin. That leaves a huge range of yarns available – note, I say ‘yarn’. Wool comes from sheep, yarn comes from everything else. You can choose from –

  1. Animal
    1. Angora:
      1. English
      2. French
      3. German
      4. Giant
      5. Satin
    2. Camellid:
      1. Alpaca
      2. Huacaya Alpaca
      3. Suri Alpaca
      4. Camel
      5. Guanaco
      6. Llama
      7. Paco-vicuña cross
      8. Vicuña
    3. Cervid:
      1. Cashgora (Cashmere-Angora cross)
      2. Cashmere goat
      3. Mohair
      4. Nigora cross
      5. PCA (Pygmy-Cashmere cross)
      6. Pygora (Pygmy-Angora cross)
    4. Silk:
      1. Bombyx / Cultivated / Mulberry
      2. Eri (Peace Silk)
      3. Muga
      4. Tussah
    5. Other:
      1. Arctic Fox
      2. Bison
      3. Cat
      4. Chinchilla
      5. Dog
      6. Highland Cattle
      7. Horse
      8. Mink
      9. Musk Ox / Qiviut
      10. Possum
      11. Reindeer
      12. Wolf
      13. Yak
  2. Plant
    1. Cellulose:
      1. Bast Bamboo
      2. Flax (linen)
      3. Hemp
      4. Nettle
      5. Paper
      6. Ramie
    2. Cotton:
      1. Acala / Upland
      2. Egyptian
      3. Naturally Colored Cotton
      4. Pima
  3. Manufactured:
    1. Acrylic
    2. Angelina
    3. Carbonized Bamboo
    4. Corn (Ingeo)
    5. Chitin
    6. Microfiber
    7. Milk (Casein)
    8. Nylon / Polyamide
    9. Pearl
    10. Polyester
    11. Rayon / Viscose
    12. Rayon from Bamboo
    13. Rayon from Banana
    14. Rose
    15. Seaweed/SeaCell
    16. Silver
    17. Soy Silk
    18. Stainless Steel
    19. Sugar Cane
    20. Tencel / Lyocell

Full disclosure: I haven’t tried all of these.

Of those I have tried, I would recommend the following as a substitute for wool:

  • Alpaca – any;
  • Cashmere;
  • Muskox/Qivuit for next to skin softness;
  • Angora – if and only if you aren’t afflicted with the scratchies. Angora is incredibly soft, but fuzzy and therefore tickly;
  • Bamboo bast or rayon – suitable for baby-soft skin;
  • Pima cotton – even though it dries the hands out as a knitting yarn;
  • Banana or soy silk – baby-soft;
  • Milk or milk and cotton blends;
  • Sugarcane;
  • High-quality acrylic, if you absolutely, positively must. It fills the seas with plastic micro-fibres, so think long and hard before you spend (serious, like cashmere-serious) money on this.

Of these, in terms of value for money, I’d go for alpaca, bamboo and cotton, in that order.

* – Worsted spinning sees the wool combed before spinning, so that all the individual fibres are parallel. It produces smooth, non-fuzzy yarn which weaves to a superior fine fabric. Woollen-spun yarns are simply carded without combing: the fibres are higgledy-piggledy and produces a fluffy, round yarn which is wonderfully warm – one example being Melton fabric, used for coats and blankets. While woollen-spun fibres are popular with handknitters, and worsted-spun with weavers, it is possible to use woollen-spun in weaving and worsted-spun in knitting.

Quora linky.

Why do clothes made from cotton feel softer than those made from wool?

Because you’re weak and soft.

Wool comes in hundreds of different qualities, some suitable for next to the skin, others better suited to outerwear. For thousands of years, people wore wool – either as fabric or fleece – from swaddling to shroud, with none of this crybabying about thquatching their thoft dewicate thkin. You got used to it, or you scratched.

Nowadays, people haven’t the skill or knowledge to select the right quality of wool for the purpose, and are too precious to give themselves time to get used to wool. They pronounce themselves ‘allergic’ (only a very tiny proportion are allergic to wool; ETA: Claire Jordan reminds me that more people are allergic to lanolin, the oil in sheep’s wool – that one is nasty), and never wear wool again.

Here’s an experiment. Grab a cotton wool ball or a face flannel, and scrub it, dry, over your skin. Or actually look when you’re towelling off after a bath. They all scrape your skin. In the case of the towel, you might well see what looks like dandruff flaking off your body as you dry. You’ll probably need to slap on a load of moisturiser, because the cotton strips the oils off your skin as well, adding to the flakiness.

The only reason cotton “feels” soft, is because the specific cotton fabric in your clothes has been chemically and mechanically treated to feel soft. Untreated cotton sandpapers the top layer of your skin off.

Quora linky.

How do you select wool (-blended) socks from a mix with cotton socks quickly, but not by burning (just by smell, sound, taste, texture-touch, moistness etc.)?

Pluck off a quantity of the fuzz, and put it in bleach. If it’s wool-only, or blended with silk or oil-based synthetics, the fuzz will completely disappear. If there’s some trace fibre left, it’s blended with a plant-based fibre.

I find wool-cotton blends to be rather heavy compared to pure wool or other wool blends, and they feel cooler to the touch. YMMV.

Isn’t taking wool from a sheep a good thing? I thought they were kind of like dogs.. they need to be groomed then we use the wool.

Any animal with hair, fur, wool, etc., benefits from grooming – including humans1.

There are primarily two kinds of sheep, one hair (kemp) and one which produces a woolly undercoat in winter. Hair sheep have been domesticated primarily for milk and secondarily for meat. Wool sheep were domesticated for primarily for wool production, and secondarily milk and meat. There are still wild sheep of both hair and wool varieties. The wild wool sheep and some domesticated primitive wool sheep still shed their woolly undercoat in spring2,3, but the majority of domesticated wool sheep need to be sheared annually as the shedding genes have been bred out.

The majority of domesticated sheep are now kept for meat and milk, and have poor quality fleeces which are often unfit for any use – though some can be used as a natural home insulation. It costs the farmer to have such sheep sheared, and the farmer then has disposal costs. As a result there’s a trend towards breeding natural shedding back into some breeds, such as the Wiltshire Horn:

So yes, whether natural shedders like the Soay, or shearing sheep like Merino, sheep need to get rid of their winter undercoat, and we would use the cast-off or sheared fleece either way. Wool is strong, insulating, water-repellent, breathable, anti-microbial, hypoallergenic, non-flammable, renewable, and (if you buy locally) low carbon-footprint4,5, unlike synthetic substitutes. Its processing is non-polluting and very easy on the environment (sheep graze otherwise unusable land, and improve it), compared with many plant-based substitutes[6]. Accept no substitutes!

Footnotes

[1] What does it feel like for a sheep after it gets sheared?

[2] How do sheep get rid of their wool naturally?

[3] Do wild sheep exist anymore?

[4] Characteristics of Wool Fabrics | Properties of Wool Fabrics

[5] 7 Properties of Wool That Might Surprise You

[6] 7 Eco-Friendly Fabrics That Will Green Your Wardrobe

Quora linky.

Why are animals of the cooler region able to produce wool?

Some, not all, animals (including some birds) in cooler regions have a seasonal requirement for a warm undercoat. In warmer weather, that undercoat is usually shed or moulted: you will notice your pet cat or dog doing so in spring.

In domesticated (but not wild) sheep, the shedding function has been eliminated wholly or partially by selective breeding.

Quora linky.

How many grams is 900 yards of wool?

It varies:

  • 59g (Filatura Di Crosa Centolavaggi, cobweb weight, 100% wool),
  • 194g (Knit Picks Palette, sockweight, 100% wool),
  • 391g (DROPS Merino Extra Fine, DK weight, 100% wool),
  • 428g (Malabrigo Worsted, Aran weight, 100% wool),
  • 703g (Cascade 128 Superwash, bulky weight, 100% wool).

The above are popular yarns – other yarns may well produce different values, especially if they aren’t 100% wool: for example, 900yds of Malabrigo Chunky (bulky weight, 100% wool) is 900g, and 900yds of Knit Picks Billow (bulky weight, 100% cotton) weighs 750g.

If you have a ballband for this yarn, you can calculate the weight of 900yds by:

  • multiplying the ball weight in g by 900, then
  • dividing the answer by the ball yardage.

Another upvote for Ravelry as a resource, and adding Yarn Substitution.

Quora linky.

Are threads of wool dangerous to the intestines?

Unlikely.

They’d have gone through the stomach first, which is basically an acid bath with added protein-digesting enzymes. Acid denatures proteins, destroying their bonds and structure – effectively causing them to ‘crumble’ apart. Wool, a protein, wouldn’t survive that in its thread-like form.

However, there is a condition in which people swallow large amounts of (usually) their own hair: trichophagia, sometimes called Rapunzel Syndrome. This can cause a large hairball to form, which can harden into a stone-like substance called a trichobezoar. Simply put, the quantity ingested has overwhelmed the stomach’s ability to digest the protein. Some people have become seriously ill as a result, and at least one is known to have died.

In short, a few strands of wool should not cause difficulties – just don’t eat anything bigger than an egg-cozy.

Quora linky.

How will you distinguish among wool, cotton, silk, and synthetic fibres?

If you’re doing this at home, you can distinguish fibres using the burn and bleach tests. Note that it can still be quite difficult to identify the fibres in a blend.

Burn test:

How to tell what the fiber is advises using a 1/2″ square of fabric held in tweezers,and a bunsen burner. I’ve used 6″ lengths of yarn and a Zippo lighter, over a damp cloth.

How to tell what the fiber is

Bleach test:

Use neat bleach in a non-reactive vessel (e.g., glass), and submerge the sample for 24hrs.

How to tell what the fiber is

Quora linky.

Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?

I don’t know. Why don’t sheep shrink in the rain?

Oh, this wasn’t the lead-in to a hilarious joke. I’m sad now. 😥

Mainly because shrinkage, felting or more correctly fulling occurs through agitation of wool and related animal fibres in heated water. So your sheep will shrink, but only if you put it in the washing machine on the Boil setting. Though frankly, shrinkage is the least of your sheep’s worries in that circumstance.

Quora linky.

Is organic wool better?

….

Not really. It depends what you’re looking for.

Organic anything is not necessarily better, and in many instances much ‘worse’. Organic vegetables, for example, are often smaller because they are grown in natural fertiliser (dung) which has fewer nutrients; they may have minor blemishes and scabbing, because they are not treated with commercial pesticides which produce better results, and so on.

Organic wool comes from sheep who are grazed on naturally-fertilised land – which may have less grazing, of less nutritive value. The sheep themselves are not given certain medications, and not put through certain dips, so they are potentially less healthy. The wool itself undergoes processing without the usual chemicals. Undernourishment, and limited veterinary intervention, can produce a finer wool*, though usually in smaller quantities. The finished yarn, organically processed in organic-only mills, can be greasy and full of VM**. Some people love this, others get hives at the thought. Come to market, it’s pricey and usually in limited supply – so no wandering in a month later when you realise you need just one more ball.

I rarely use organic wool myself, but much of my knitting is for pattern-writing – there’s no point in me writing a pattern for that limited-run almost-organic mohair-Wensleydale blend produced by a nice lady vet locally, because by the time it would be written, she’d be sold out of this year’s shearing. But I do bagsy a few batts to spin myself, and make a cowl or gloves just for me, and I know she doesn’t starve her animals or deny them treatment. Lesson being: buy organic when you can visit the sheep it comes from.

* – The best cashmere comes from half-starved desert and mountain Cashmere goats, not their well-fed and well-cared-for brethren in the south of England (ND: half-starved because the native forage is so poor. Not because they’re denied food).

** – Vegetable matter. Twigs, hay, thorns, and occasionally poop.