Textile
Sheep’s wool is one of the first materials used by humans to make clothing. Any wool can be processed, but some breeds are naturally better, for instance Merino. Raw fleece can have different shades from pure white to beige, brown or black. An important component of wool is lanolin, a fat that impregnates sheep’s skin and that lends wool its characteristic smell. It is thanks to lanolin that wool can be easily spun or felted. Our courses will teach you how to process raw fleece; you will try washing, combing, colouring, felting, spinning and weaving it into a fabric.
Common flax has the same importance among vegetable materials as wool has among animal ones. Fibres acquired from the stem are used to produce linen (spinning flax), while seeds were pressed for oil (oil flax) and were also used for the preparation of food or production of medications. Even the waste found its use. The remains of the process of pressing were fed to livestock, while the remains of the processing of the stem – hards and tow – were used as a material for thermal insulation. Today, we can no longer see a landscape with fields of blue flowers of spinning flax, and the fields with oil flax are rare. Procuring flax, even for experiments with its processing, is a superhuman task, which is one of the reasons why we intend to return this crop to sunlight, where it belongs.