Style Column
GREY FOX COLUMN David Evans dusts off his winter woollens and tweeds and visits the Campaign for Wool to find out why wool is the best fabric of all www.greyfoxblog.com
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s winter tightens its grip, we turn our attention, naturally, to wool. For millennia this wonderful material has kept sheep and their wild forebears both warm and dry. The pre-domestication origin of the species is lost in the mists of time and may now be extinct, but early animals would have been initially hunted and later domesticated for their meat, milk and skins. Once they were farmed, their fleeces would have been plucked as they moulted or, once an appropriate tool
was available, shorn and the wool made into cloth. It would be fascinating to know how man discovered the skills of spinning and weaving to make cloth to replace skins for their clothes. The advantages of using a renewable resource would have been clear – to provide a skin you need to slaughter the animal – wool comes from the fleece which regrows each year. The Campaign for Wool organises an annual Wool Week at which the virtues of wool are extolled. In Cumbria, the local sheep,
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