The Wool Wire | May 8, 2025
From paper to wallpaper, plus a staggering infographic and a chance to cuddle lambs.
News snippets from the wool world
Hello, my friends!
Have you ever wondered what goes into raising sheep and running a small domestic yarn business? Or what would motivate someone with no prior agricultural experience to enter the field now? Or what hope might they see for the future of domestic wool?
I recently had a chance to pose these questions to Michigan yarn entrepreneur and shepherdess Sherry Mitchell, who began Mitchell Wool just a few years ago. She gave a tour of her operations, lifted the lids on the dyepots, and introduced us to a charming lamb named Cupcake. You can watch the whole conversation here.
A staggering growth of synthetics
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words might a powerful animated infographic be worth? If we're talking about this one from Woolmark, the answer is many.
The video animates the global production of wool, cotton, synthetic, and cellulosic fiber production, year over year, since 1970. It's a powerful visualization that helps people understand the scope of the synthetic problem—and it needs to be shared by all of us, as far and wide as possible.
Sheets of sheep
Even with production at all-time lows, it's still important to use every ounce of wool fiber as efficiently as possible. We've talked about using wool waste for everything from pellets to insulation. But I didn't see this one coming: Italian specialty paper product manufacturer Favini is adding wool to the darker shades of its Refit paper line.
We recover wool and cotton textile waste, or in the case of denim, we recover the material from worn out jeans that can no longer be sold.
Refit contains 25% wool, cotton or denim processing residues (up 10% from our previous Refit range!) for a total of over 50% pre- and post-consumer recycled materials.
Deck the walls
Temperature isn't the only thing wool is good at regulating. It's also a highly effective absorber of sound, making wool an ideal acoustic material for potentially noisy public places. (And even for less noisy, private places like one's home.)
Instead of covering our walls with wallpaper, we can now cover them with, drumroll please, Woolpaper! These rolls of plush wool felt have a self-adhesive backing for easy installation. It's currently only available in a handful of rather drab colors clearly intended for public places. And I'm not sure how far the company ships from its base in Austria.
And yet....It never hurts to dream, right?
On that note, I'll let you go.
Thanks, as always, for your readership and your support.
Until next time,
Clara
