A nice woolen jacket at the women's store in Vineland, Modella, is advertised as "boiled wool" and I realized I didn't know anything about how boiled wool is made. I found my answer in Wikipedia:
"Boiled wool is a type of felted wool, and is similar to non-woven wool felt. These processes date at least as far back as the Middle Ages. The word felt itself comes from West Germanic feltaz. Boiled/felted wool is characteristic of the traditional textiles of South America and Tyrolean Austria. It is produced industrially around the world."
"Boiled wool fabric is created commercially by first knitting wool yarns to create a fabric of uniform thickness. The yarns and fabric may either be dyed or left natural, and the fabric may include designs or embellishments. After knitting, the fabric is fulled by boiling and agitating in hot water and an alkaline solution like soap. The agitation causes the scaly surface of wool fibers to stick together, producing a felted fabric. The result is a tighter and denser material that is up to 50% smaller in all directions than the pre-felted fabric. Boiled wool is warm, durable, and resistant to water and wind. The general process of felting can be used to process non-woven fibers into pieces of felt used in industry, medical applications, and for crafts and costumes. This can be performed using a variety of fibers, including wool blends, rayon, polyester, and acrylic."
Fulling has its own entry and was an ancient practice for processing wool.
What about other fabrics and ancient practices? I found a few weird ones:
"In Madagascar people have taken the time to capture Golden Orb Weaver Spiders and extract their silk. To make a cape from their silk around 1m square it took a team eight years to capture female spiders from the wild and slowly draw their silk out. 1.2 million spiders were needed to make the cape so don’t expect to be wearing this material any time soon. But it is a lovely golden colour though.
If you are worried about wearing fabrics derived from animals then Biocouture could be the fashion brand for you. Started by Suzanne Lee the range of clothes relies on organisms like bacteria and fungi to grow their fabric for them. And if you worry about the disposable nature of modern fashion then you should know that these clothes can simply be thrown on the compost heap after you are done with them. By putting bacterial cultures in a complex set up – a bath tub – and feeding them a complex diet – green tea – Biocouture makes what is described as being like a plant leather. Dried, coloured, and shaped the clothes look much like any other leather product.
Silk gains much of its value from the scarcity of the raw materials it is made from. For one entrepreneur however there is a silk substitute made from a material no further away than your fridge. Qmilch uses proteins found in cows’ milk to spin a fine thread that behaves almost exactly like its pricier rival. Milk fabric has been created before and milk cotton was popular for a time in the 1930s but tended to be mixed with acrylonitrile to strengthen the fibres made from milk casein. Other artificial fabrics were invented however that struck consumers as less milky. Qmilch does away with these synthetic additions and claims to be more ecologically friendly. Around a gallon and a half (6 litres) of milk is apparently enough to make a whole dress from Qmilch."
And there is hag fish slime, woolly mammoth fur, pineapples, sea silk and others in the article HERE.
Trains in Silverton today - the Durango Silverton Railroad.
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