down with mohair

[cimorene]

Fun fact! My skin is so sensitive to mohair that my past experiences with wearing it over 20 years ago still make me recoil and reflexively get angry when I see the written word.

Every time I see a pattern go by on Ravelry that uses mohair - which is a lot because it's a popular luxury fiber - I experience a brief intense wave of resentment and have to remind myself that other people like mohair and it's not bad for them to write patterns for it just because I would have to substitute a different yarn in order to get gauge.

(I suppose lace-weight cashmere would be a good substitute, since angora is so hard to source ethically¹ if you don't spin it yourself. Lace-weight mohair seems to be much more widespread, though. Probably because it provides that fuzzy haze around the fabric as well as presumably feeling soft to other people. I wouldn't know; to me it feels like millions of tiny sentient and malicious alien needles trying to burrow through my skin. If you want to duplicate the haze, you probably need an angora blend.)


 

1. In my case, angora is not hard to source ethically since I can get piles of it just by brushing Rowan, but lace-weight yarn is a bit harder to source ethically as I can't spin it myself. (My sister spins, but she mostly uses hanks that are pre-carded; she hasn't gotten around to getting a carding setup.)

Unethical angora wool: Some breeds of angora are sheared to collect the wool, much like very small sheep, and others shed their fur so it's better to comb it out - which is also how cashmere is collected from the goats and the reason that cashmere and angora are so expensive: combing has to be done by a person, so the process can't be made any cheaper by automation. Angora bunnies have rather delicate skin, though, and combing the wool out is both time-consuming and fiddly because it requires a degree of gentleness; even doing it by hand, even doing it just with my fingertips and no comb, I've accidentally left small bald spots on Rowan that were red and irritated afterwards (though not uncomfortable enough at the moment of extraction for him to complain!). A lot of yarn brands have responded to exposes of human rights abuse in mass-produced angora yarns by dropping angora blends from their lines after videos of angoras having their fur yanked out by the roots surfaced years ago. This is painful but not fatal, but I'd strongly advise against looking for images. I haven't seen a non-local&homespun angora yarn in a local yarn store for years now.

Comments

[yvannairie]

out of curiosity, how do you think something like alpaca would compare? Can you even make yarn that light out of it? I have a few alpaca wool things and they're as a rule less itchy and more soft than almost everything else I own.

[spark]

https://www.thenaturalfibre.co.uk/blog/wool-journey-part-2-wool-attributes-thickness is a really nice explanation, in fact their whole site is pretty great.

eta: meant as reply to above comment re alpacas

[(Anonymous)]

At the Sheep & Wool Festival in Maryland, I have seen a woman spinning soft yarn from the rabbit on her lap, which just lay there. Would something like that work? It was an extremely fuzzy rabbit -- she was working from the tips of the fur in small amounts at a time.

[cimorene]

Alpaca is less irritating to some people's skin and the yarn made of it tends to be smoother because of the length and texture of the fibers. There's a more in-depth explanation of fiber size and feel at the link in the below comment here.

In fact I also find it to be a bit less itchy than wool in general, particularly alpaca silk, which is well suited to looking lustrous. But even baby alpaca is still too itchy for me to wear on my neck - the only fibers I've been able to find that don't itch there are "superfine" merinos (I don't think that's a technical term though), cashmere, and cashmere silk. (Alpaca silk is okay for a shirt though, for the most part.) Merino is any wool from a merino sheep, and sheep have coarser and finer hairs on their bodies even on the same sheep (so do people and cats and dogs I guess...), so there's quite a spectrum from the softer stuff in an expensive yarn or a performance sport brand like Icebreaker to the lower quality that you find in base layers for sale at Prisma (I'm glad they have them, but I couldn't wear those shirts next to the skin).

The strand of mohair blend used to add color dimension and texture to a pattern is usually a lace weight one, so yes, there's lots of alpaca yarn in that weight available - alpaca is quite strong, in fact, stronger than some wools. It wouldn't have the halo effect you get from mohair or angora, although alpaca does have a bit of haze. But just holding two yarns together of slightly different colors will still give a nice subtle marl effect to the knit fabric.

[cimorene]

You can make yarn that way if you know how to use a hand spindle and have one (we don't!), but it would be pure angora yarn which tends to be very prone to breakage because it's so fine and is also shorter than sheep's wool. That's why for strength people usually blend it with wool from sheep or alapacas. I've seen videos of people doing that on Youtube, too.

You could do it from Rowan, probably, but you wouldn't get all that far anyway because he's smaller and more jumpy than a full size angora.

[laurajv]

MOHAIR IS A DEMON FIBER

i join you in your hatred and skin-prickles

[yvannairie]

Thank you!

[yvannairie]

Oooh :Oc okay, thank you -- this was very informative :D

[cimorene]

I was reigning myself in to not talk more. I love talking about fiber!

[yvannairie]

No, please do! I don't anything about this type of craft, I took woodcraft in school and my mom only got crafty once I moved out so I've never had a chance to learn anything outside of sewing :D

[cimorene]

Okay, well, marled effects like one sees in heather gray tshirt fabric for example are (traditionally) achieved by knitting two colors twisted together, either from two different skeins or from a yarn that has multiple colors (or just shades) twisted together.

And it's pretty common for patterns with a luxury idea (vibe? element?) to be designed and written to be knitted with a strand of fingering-weight (ie 4-strand) yarn that is more affordable and stronger and a strand of lace weight mohair yarn (ie 2-strand) eg in the popular Oslo hat by PetiteKnit. You should be able to see a faint haze if you zoom in. Here's someone's photo of the two yarns side by side from their project page.

In contrast here's a skein of 2-ply lace pure cashmere, which you can see looks a bit squishy but less hazy. OTOH here's a 55% angora hat with its angora haze, but you can also find angora yarns with little to no haze... I presume because of the spinning method. This one is half and half but it looks more like merino... for example, in these mittens you can only see a very slight haze.

Here's a popular lace-weight pure alpaca yarn, Misti Alpaca Lace Solids and here's one from Holst Garn, which is slightly expensive brand I've been meaning to buy some of - here's the Oslo hat made with it instead of mohair.

[yvannairie]

Yeah, okay, with the visual aids I'm following this much better. I'm working on some arts and crafts with wool thread (I think "7 veljestä", so you probably know better what's in it than I do) and it has... a kind of fuzz on the surface, but nothing like the halo on the angora and mohair examples. I wouldn't wanna wear anything I'm making of this around my neck, definitely.


Also I know from other contexts that synthetic fibers tend to be super smooth, I guess that makes them more "generally" wearable? At least, I don't know anyone who wouldn't be able to use synthetic scarves and all my scarves that I can wear under my coat are synthetic.

Also out of further curiosity, does this work the same for crocheting? And how does it change if we start talking about weaving instead? (Although if those are super big and complicated questions, don't feel like you gotta give me an answers, I just love being infodumped to.)

[cimorene]

Synthetic fibers are often recommended for people with allergies, although honestly, I would never recommend them for anything other than like... extremely easy cleanup. Polyester and acrylic yarns and polyester and acrylic fabrics have other drawbacks, namely:

-they feel gross (not to everyone obv but I can feel it even in blends sometimes)
-they tend to smell gross, because they are breeding grounds for bacteria because of the way they hold moisture. performance fabrics for sports etc keep the skin dry and are treated with antimicrobial stuff to halt the growth of microbes but they still get smelly and retain smells easily. This is the opposite behavior from wool, which has antimicrobial properties, needs little washing, and resists odors.
- they don't have the same chemical properties as natural fibers (eg weight, volume, elasticity, how they respond to heat and wet) so they won't behave the same when knitted up as wool would, if you're substituting them into a pattern; but of course people can also engineer things with their properties in mind if you're talking about technical fabrics and garments like for sports and hiking.

...However, you may be including manufactured cellulose fibers (rayon/viscose, modal, lyocell) in synthetics, but I'm not. That is, they are chemically extruded in processes that I understand use up a lot of water, but they are made from plants and don't behave the way plastic fibers do.

Besides yarns made of bamboo and other viscose, there are plant fibers like cotton and linen (which, however, don't make very warm sweaters if they're not blended with something else, and lack the elasticity of wool).

Wool blankets, even more than wool insulation layers in outerwear, have mostly been replaced by polyester fleece worldwide because they're incredibly cheap and easy to make from fleece as well as being machine washable and, again, hypoallergenic. But aside from the smell issues (the texture one doesn't really apply to synthetic fleece I guess because the fleece feel overrides the plastic feel?), fleece wears out much faster than wool and when it does it contributes to the enormous environmental microplastic problem... although I think people didn't know about that issue when poly fleece was new.

7 Veljestä is the most common sock yarn in Finland and it's perfectly fine for socks, and quite cheap, which is nice. The blanket I'm sitting under right now is made of it, because I wanted it to be machine washable, and 7 Veljestä is that. What makes it sock yarn is that it's about 25% (I think?) synthetic, which helps it wear out more slowly in the heel and toe - which always obviously tend to get holes first in socks. It's a bit harsher on the skin than a higher-quality sock yarn would be, but that doesn't really matter for a wool sock very much as you tend to wear them on top of other socks.

Crocheted fabric will still show halo, although I think it wouldn't look exactly the same. The main difference is the thickness and drape, because each stitch in crochet is about twice as thick as each stitch in knitting - or to put it another way is made of 2 loops where knitting is made of 1 loop. That makes the fabric thicker and less drapey, obviously, and because each crochet stitch is sort of... almost a knot, it also doesn't have the elasticity of knitting.

I believe that the fuzziness SHOULD show through the same, or even more so perhaps, in weaving, though I've never done any. If you have a woven woollen blanket, they are usually brushed to make them fuzzier - same process that flannel goes through to make it fuzzy.

[yvannairie]

ngl bamboo fiber is an entirely new concept to me :'DD

[cimorene]

It's a common source of viscose, which has been rising in cotton blends (or replacing cotton) due to the global consumption of cotton being unsustainable. It makes a drapier tshirt, for example, and has a silk-reminiscent sheen, which can be nice. It's as breathable but less prone to retaining water - that is, it wicks it away and dries faster - which makes it better than cotton for underwear.

[yvannairie]

So, wait, is the rule that animal fibers are stretchier and thicker, while plant fibers are thinner and less elastic? Or is it just a matter how how the fabric is made?

[cimorene]

Hmmm... I don't know if it's all animal fibers that are stretchier! And all plant fibers aren't thinner than all animal fibers, certaintly. Rather there's a lot of overlap. The reason wool and alpaca stretches so well is to do with its protein structure, and that's also why it contracts better afterward, while knitted cotton is fairly heavy-draping in comparison. I imagine it's similar for things like camel and cashmere, but silk, for example, which is an animal fiber but a completely different kind, is incredibly strong and not stretchy (which is why it tends to be blended with wool or alpaca etc to achieve the desired sweater behavior).

[yvannairie]

Oh man that link is fascinating, thank you so much.

Do you have any more interesting things you wanna go off, I feel like I'm at the limit where I don't know how to ask interesting questions anymore but I am learning so much :'DD

[cimorene]

I'm slightly chemically impaired atm but did I mention that some fibers, like alpaca and merino, can be both cooler when it's warm AND warmer when it's cold, due to the way they trap air between them?

An interesting extension of this is bouclé.

Bouclé is both a yarn and a fabric made from it.. The yarn is made from a length of loops of similar size which can range from tiny circlets to large curls. To make bouclé, at least two strands are combined, with the tension on one strand being much looser than the other as it is being plied, with the loose strand forming the loops and the other strand as the anchor.

So the loops on a strand of boucle yarn are a bit like the loops on the back of a cotton terry fabric, except they go up and down the entire length of the yarn. Alpaca bouclé has appeared increasingly from several brands in the last few years. My favorite lounging around at home sweater (though I pretty much need to replace it because I've now worn it to pieces) is knitted out of boucle at an extremely loose gauge, that is, with larger needles to make more air in each loop. The fluffy loops on the yarn provide bulk, and tend to felt to their adjoining yarns which reduces how far the fabric will stretch in different ways (because it catches against the loops that are touching it when you pull on it). This is because if you knit boucle at a tight gauge to allow little air through, the thickness of the fabric and denseness of the loops would make it extremely hot. But because of the loops and their tendency to felt to each other gradually, what would normally be like a fishnet fabric on needles so big with yarn so thin actually forms a fabric with drape because the loose loops and fuzzy halo hairs interlock to trap a layer of air. This makes the fabric smooth and very drapey, but much warmer than expected given how low its mass is - due to all the air it is able to trap. But because it's mostly air, it's also capable of being cooler than a comparable non-boucle weight sweater - because the cooler ambient air can pass through it in the form of breezes.

Here are some of the other most liked finished sweaters made with the same yarn: this one is made with boucle held together with another strand of baby alpaca-silk blend, this is the one that inspired me initially to make mine, a black cowl neck, an oversized striped one.

[yvannairie]

Interesting! Do you think specially knit bouclé could be used as a more ecofriendly alternative to fleece and microfiber?

[cimorene]

Boucle isn't necessary - wool knit is already a more ecofriendly alternative to fleece! Natural fiber boucle is somewhat given to pilling compared with fleece pile, so while it feels nice, other kinds of knitting would usually be more convenient replacements.

It would really be more accurate to say that fleece came about as a less ecofriendly, but much cheaper and crucially more machine-washable substitute for traditional woolly knits, and those are the qualities that have led to its dominance.

In fact, machine washable wools have been around for a while now, but they're not perfect - I would guess that until recently they were even less available. Generally, they don't compare favorably with the range of wool and animal fiber yarns that you can't machine wash, quality wise, and often even if you technically can machine wash a wool sweater, or might be able to, it would simply be safer and better not to.

Because of wool's antimicrobial nature, wool sweaters don't actually need washing as much as their fleece equivalents, or ordinary shirts - spot washing, brushing, etc, is generally okay, and soaking or gentle hand-washing in cold water is usually the most one should do. But the more complicated or unusual the care requirements of a textile, the less convenient and less appealing. And of course, over the broad range of uses for sweaters or fleece garments, there are quite a few where it could come out caked or drenched in muck - the kinds of situations where hand washing or a washing machine's hand wash cycle really would be necessary.

[yvannairie]

Yeah, I was thinking about fleece mostly in industrial contexts -- I actually already use a few knitted washcloths but they're all made out of cotton and they're not terribly good for doing dusting b/c they dry very slowly after being washed unlike the few microfiber rags I have. Terrycloth rags are better, but I guess plastics just have an advantage as far as cleaning goes.

Funnily enough I also happen to know that wool felt is better as sound insulation than fleece, both for air quality and the damping effect itself. Felt just doesn't drape, so fleece and teddy curtains get used instead of it quite a lot. I know felt bases are often used around electronics b/c they don't catch fire when overheated and will put out small electric fires as well.

[cimorene]

Oh, sorry! Well, there are perhaps some circumstances where natural fiber knits could replace stretchy fleece fabrics. Certainly you could make boucle curtains, or boucle-lined curtains. I suspect it's the practicalities of creating and caring for them that have stopped people from doing that. Boucle yarn is a bit hard to work with; I'm not sure I've ever even seen anything machine-knitted out of it, so I'm not positive if our technology currently allows for that at all. It probably could be developed to do so, though - the computers and machines that weave, spin, and knit fibers are getting more advanced all the time, which is why ultra-light knitted merino has so recently appeared on the regular marketplace (like I mean, Prisma and not just sky-high specialty stores). The issue is the fineness of the yarn... we didn't previously have the ability to spin and knit wool that fine. (I believe only merino is fine enough for those methods to work.) So if there's a physically possible solution, it's always possible someone could come up with it. And there might be other ways to create pile fabric out of natural fibers that I don't know about since my knowledge is mostly about hand-making.

Yeah, cotton is terrible about retaining water. It's only better than wool for making washcloths because you can get it extremely hot and wash it with pretty hardcore soaps basically as many times as you want without (as much) shrinking or anything. I suppose hand-crocheted or -knitted cotton could be useful as an ecological way to scrub one's own skin, but we already have cotton washcloths and they do fine at that as far as I can tell.

I gather the reason microfiber is so good at cleaning is precisely the micro-ness, and it's much much smaller than any natural fibers (that I know of), so I can't see how one could substitute for it. It might be that science could create a cellulose-based microfiber, since cellulose fibers are already created chemically? I tried to google it, but it seems that very tiny cellulose is primarily used (now at least) in a non-textile form. Apparently nanocellulose is a biomass material that is used for gels and to add bulk to medicines (?) and various industrial applications. I found a few sources that say things like 'microfiber sheets can be made of cellulose or synthetics' and 'microfiber towels can be made of cellulose or synthetics', but I haven't found any examples of products. I agree, microfiber cleaning cloth is much more effective. It's what I mostly use for cleaning things now (that and magic eraser).

[yvannairie]

I wonder if it has something to do with the electric properties of microfiber as well. I don't actually know which natural fibers are good for their antistatic properties (despite that being the sort of thing I should know on a technicality, working with electronics as much as I do =,=) do you have any insight into that?

[cimorene]

Well, wool and alpaca are terrible. I think silk is staticky too?

Cotton and linen and hemp would be my bet... but let's see...

websearch seems to indicate that for true antistatic fabrics, some kind of treatment is used to move the electricity elsewhere. I would imagine there are probably some natural fibers or natural blends that this has been done to.

But in general, wool is very staticky, so cotton is a better choice (other animal hair wooly layers like alpaca and angora and yak and cashmere probably are more similar to wool here, but I haven't confirmed that yet).

I'm pretty sure linen and hemp are more similar to cotton and hence safer, but I can't find backup for this (so far) in my searching and reading - and nb the unique qualities of linen wrt heat and wrinkling are due to its natural oil content, so I'm not sure about it actually.

Synthetics in general build up more static, as do different types of fabrics rubbing together (because they are more likely to have different electron charges).

So in summary pure cotton is the best choice, it looks like, which is what I would have guessed. I'd probably take off a wool layer or fold it up so it wasn't touching skin and then moisturize well before touching something staticky in the Dry and Staticky Times (I frequently get shocked by touching metal outdoors and I don't like it, but I've never had an antistatic job... though of course if you do you probably have the shoes and wristband anyway, which are more effective than that I think). And I probably would not wear a woolen sweater to, you know, assemble computers or whatever.

When one is talking about the static produced by a tumble dryer - which I don't think is your concern, but just in case -, I found a couple of sources claiming that all natural fibers including silk and wool are less prone to static build up than synthetics, but that not drying the naturals and synthetics together is the best thing to do. I suppose if it was a big concern of mine I'd go research it more because I don't quite see why, but I don't have a dryer, so w/e.

[yvannairie]

Okay this is not even the point but what is even the point of dryers other than speed and convenience? Isn't air-drying better for the fabric anyway? =__=)

[cimorene]

I think it's speed and convenience. If you have a lot of laundry cycling through and don't have a lot of space to hang it all, or if you need it back faster and your conditions won't allow it to hang dry quickly... and then there's also the fact that towels and clothes fresh from the dryer are all warm, as if they'd been left over the radiator, and that can be really nice. But, yeah, we don't need one, and I don't want one!