Our wool

Get up close and personal with our yarns and learn more about how they are produced.

Our animals

Our woollen yarns use 100% natural are all produced in Peru. Our Crazy Sexy Wool comes from the fleece of sheep raised in the Peruvian highlands. These slopes are also the home to the alpacas who produce the fleece that becomes our Sugar Baby Alpaca and alpaca blends. For our Sheepaca and Wooly Bully yarns, which are a blend of alpaca and merino wool, the merino is sourced from Uruguay, where the sheep are looked after with the same loving care as our Peruvian flocks.

When we started our woolly adventure, we travelled to Peru ourselves to meet with the suppliers and farms to ensure that all production processes met with the values of Wool and the Gang. We believe that it’s our responsibility to do our best to look after our planet, its people and its animals.

The animals who produce the wool for our yarns are looked after on small family farms in the Peruvian highlands. These farmers are the descendants of a long line of alpaca breeders. They combine alpaca and sheep breeding with smallholding and need to manage the livestock well for their livelihood – this means that they take care with breeding, shearing and the general welfare of their animals.

Screen-Shot-2015-09-18-at-3.09.40-PM

From fleece to yarn

Care is taken with each step of the manufacturing process:

First our woolly friends are shorn – there is no mulesing* involved at all.

yarn ball
The yarn tops (tops are the yarn fibres – the nice fluffy stuff that’s spun into yarn) are then dyed using low impact dyes certified by both REACH and Oeko Tex.

yarn ball

The dyed tops are then spun into yarn.

yarn ball

Care is taken with each step of manufacturing our yarns – renewable energy sources power the process and close attention is paid to safety.  There is no child labour involved in the production process – Peru has very strict policies outlawing this.

Our wool is not vegan, however we have alternative yarns that are really cool and are upcycled from the textile industry. They would normally end up in a landfill, however we recycle these materials to give them a second life. Our Jersey Be Good is a t-shirt yarn made from the offcuts of fabric rolls and our Mixtape yarn is regenerated from the scraps of jersey production.

Read about the production of our Jersey Be Good: http://blog.woolandthegang.com/2015/04/fabricated-tales/

Alpaca

Alpacas were domesticated by the Incas over 6,000 years ago and are part of the Camelidae family, which includes llamas, guanacos and vicunas from South America, and camels from Asia and Africa.

There are around 3.5 million alpacas in the world today – 3 million of these live in Peru, 10,000 feet above sea level.

Alpaca fibre lacks lanolin, which makes it hypo-allergenic, and it comes in 16 recognised natural shades – no other animal fibre offers this natural variety in colour.

Baby alpaca fibres are those taken from the nape and the neck of the animal, which are the softest and most beautiful.

Sheep

We share the planet with approximately 1,084,305,000 sheep at any one time and there around 900 different breeds!

China boasts the largest sheep population, however Australia is the biggest producer of clean raw wool, with a whopping 245,000 tonnes being produced every year – that’s 80% of the wool used in clothing!

New Zealand, Mongolia and Australia all have more than three times as many sheep as people.

An average sheep produces 4.5kg of fleece – that’s around seven woolly sweaters.

 

zzzz

zzz

zcv

*Mulesing is a practice quite commonly used in Australia to reduce the incidence of flystrike – we’ve googled this so you don’t have to; it’s an infestation of maggots. Again, you may not want to google this practise as it involves surgically removing skin from around the breech and tail area of the sheep.

Alpaca facts via Mother Nature Network Sheep facts via Guardian and British Wool Marketing Board

Get to know our yarns a little better on our Meet the Yarn pages. It’s okay to have a favourite – we won’t tell.

 

 

6 Comments

  1. This is fascinating! Thank you for sharing! It is always great to know the story behind the materials we are working with! It makes the whole process so much more meaningful!

  2. Thank you for making sure no mulesing is involved in the confection of your wool! It is a barbaric and cruel practice, and I’m glad WATG distances themselves from it! Keep up the good work, peeps!

    • Thank you Marcela! We agree – we want everyone to feel good about our yarn, inside and out.

  3. It’s great it know more about the wool you sell, and the amazing animals that produce it. My favourite yarn is the Crazy Sexy Wool, so it’s nice to know the process of its manufacture from Alpaca to dyed yarn :-)

    • Thanks Emily! We love the Crazy Sexy Wool too. It’s actually 100% Peruvian sheep wool, not alpaca – we just tweaked the blog post to make this clear : )

Submit a comment