Counting Sheep...Gonna Wanna Sleep...Bedroom by Moi Critters??

Nascor and Regis as yearlings​

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Regis...2008

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Emmy checking for sheeps...smells like there should be sheeps??​

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Ewe Barn...or the Sheep Dip Inn with the sign over the entrance that reads, sheep dip out!​

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Scottish Blackface wool said:

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Hmmm...history of beds...good place to start some thinking on...

http://inventors.about.com/od/bstartinventions/a/bed.htm:
The Mattress
A Short History of Mattress Making tells us that "A typical bed of 1600 in its simplest form was a timber frame with rope or leather supports. The mattress was a 'bag' of soft filling which was most commonly straw and sometimes wool that was covered in plain, cheap fabric.

In the mid 18th century, the cover became made of quality linen or cotton, the mattress cane box was shaped or bordered and the fillings available were natural and plenty, including coconut fibre, cotton, wool and horse hair.

The mattresses also became tufted or buttoned to hold the fillings and cover together and the edges were stitched.

Iron and steel replaced the past timber frames in the late 19th century. The most expensive beds of 1929 were latex rubber mattresses produced by the very successful 'Dunlopillow'. Pocket spring mattresses were also introduced. These were individual springs sewn into linked fabric bags.

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So that be that fur now...

Doggone & Chicken UP!

Tara Lee Higgins
Higgins Rat Ranch Conservation Farm, Alberta, Canada

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How dreamy cloudish is this??

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A Homemade Mattress? said:

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Our mattress is worn out. We need a new one, but I’ve been dreading buying a new one. I don’t like the waste of it all: the ignoble dragging of the old mattress to the curb the prospect of sleeping on a brand new construct of toxic foam and fire retardants–or opting for a less toxic but less comfortable futon.

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in Greece, mattresses are made by local craftsmen, and are stuffed with 100% wool. These mattresses basically last for life. When the wool gets compressed the mattress guys will empty it out, fluff it up, and re-stuff it, adding more wool if necessary. The wool and the cover can be washed, too.

This made so much sense. It was clean, local, ecological. Sensible. Why had I never heard of it before?

Renae said she’d looked around for an American version of this, but could find nothing to suit her, so was considering buying 150 lbs of wool and doing it herself.

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Turns out the Italians and the French as well as the Greeks are keeping this old bedcraft alive. (I’m not sure who else does this.) I read an article in the Telegraph about a British woman who dragged her beloved wool mattress home from Italy. It’s 45 years old and doing well. When she lived in Italy, she took part in the sensible practice of mattress maintenance:

I get the impression that this maintenance is not annual, but happens as necessary–which may be something like every 5 years. She had some trouble finding a craftsperson in England to re-stuff her mattress (because the art is lost there, too) but after a 30 year search (her mattress becoming perilously thin in the meantime) finally found someone in Wales who was game to try.

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Here in the U.S. there are retailers who sell wool stuffed mattresses. They are specialty retailers who sell non-allergic, toxin-free alternative bedding. These offerings are expensive. But more frustrating than the money is the fact that the beds just don’t look as good as the French and Italian mattresses I’ve seen (see the links above). The euro mattresses look like proper mattresses: thick, with squared off sides that will hold a sheet well. The allergy mattresses are thin, and look more like futons. Strangely, they are also two-part systems. All the companies I looked at recommended you buy a base mattress, which will be about 5 inches thick, and then a softer wool “topper” — essentially a thinner, less firmly stuffed wool mattress — to make it comfortable. By the time you buy both components for a queen bed you’ll be paying more than $2,000 (Twice as much as the Parisian bed–and I don’t think of Paris as Bargain Central). And this doesn’t include shipping. And no one is going to come to your house to fluff your wool.

So…once again….it’s come to this. I’m considering making my own.

I’ve garnered some clues in my research:

1) The best wool for beds is long staple wool. Some recommended breeds: Texel, Suffolk, Clun Forest, Blanc du Massif Central and Dorset Horn wool.

2) The game Welsh craftsperson who re-stuffed that lady’s 45 year old mattress said she figured out the wool needs to be laid down one layer at a time in the ticking, not actually stuffed. You have to work with the nature of the wool. It took her about 6 hours to fill the mattress.

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You want someone to do what? Swing on by and fluff up what...and in yer bedroom too...wee doo / wee doo...gettin' a tad racy are weeze?

Here is a step by step on making a COTTON mattress...Florida 1914...

http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00084614/00001/1j


Incredibly detailed on a cotton mattress...1965

http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNAAW960.pdf


Eco living: The mattresses that last 50 years
Sarah Lonsdale learns how a wool-stuffed mattress can outlast internally sprung products by decades, cutting down on waste.
By Sarah Lonsdale - 22 Nov 2012

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...living-The-mattresses-that-last-50-years.html:

There is a photo on this article of a bed...I remember those kinda beds too...the wire ones, you could step into the bed frame and get yerself snared up...I REMEMBER these ... good gack!

Hee hee...and making a mattress of wool...I guess I get to also tout that I ain't filling up the landfills with all that perfectly recyclable stuff, eh. And I thought I might not have anything to use up my Jacob fleeces with...hmm...now I am pondering...got lots but how much is gonna go in the king sized mattress...gotta shear them sheeps again this year...will I be doing this with thoughts of stock piling it go restuff the mattress...ho hum...what FUN!

Sure is getting more and more wonderful - this mattress woolly bully adventure!

Doggone & Chicken UP!

Tara Lee Higgins
Higgins Rat Ranch Conservation Farm, Alberta, Canada

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March 28, 2013 - Wool shop and wool storage area
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About Us said:

Wool washing...the first process...it was steamy and it was hot...LOL...

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I am totally thinking I may mimic this...hot water, some kinda soap...the wool was dumped in and moved along with metal fingers...heck, a good old hay pitch fork would due in a pinch!

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This is one of their carding machines...

http://www.customwoolenmills.com/carding:

So see...I can card (cottage industry--now I need to live in a cottage I guess!) my own wool...

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Even with this machine, I believe MY fibre is too long to be processed by this...too long means it gets all tangled up in there and does not come off the needly metal teethies!

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So I could not have my wool processed by this mill. I will have to card it myself and likely with hand held carding tools. No worries...carding is meant to get the fibres to lay straight and to get any VM (vegetable matter...so like hay which the sheeps would be eating...I order my hay without Timothy in it...timothy seed heads are horrible to fibre...the heads are like little brushes and get buried in the fleeces...blah!).

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Lotsa kewl old machines here...

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This is called a spinning mule...it spins the carded wool into yarn. The whole contraption moves across the floor.​

All these moving parted machines require constant upkeep...a lost art in many cases...would you know how to fix any of these parts...let alone some of them are wooden and have to be made on a lathe!

Knitting machine said:

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Knitting

Custom Woolen Mills yarns are especially made for hand-knitting. Hand-knitting and the various precursors to it have been practiced for thousands of years by cultures all around the world. We work with many hand-knitters in our area to offer a variety of hand-made goods in our online and retail store.

We also make machine knit socks. The first recognized double cylinder knitting machines, not so distant relatives of the machines used at Custom Woolen Mills, were created around 1900. Prior to 1900, woolen mills would pay hand knitters to knit their own brand of goods and give them special "knitting recipes" to knit to. Custom Woolen Mills uses a William Spiers model knitter built prior to 1917 as a demonstration machine and we do all of our production on 1950's and 1960’s model Bentley Komet machines. The Bentley Komets can produce a sock in three to ten minutes.

Custom Woolen Mills also demonstrates the home knitting machines built in the early 1800’s and 1900’s, called “hand-crank knitting machines”. There are many different makes of hand-crank knitting machines, some now harder to come by than other. Most famously, they were made widely available in Canada through the war effort. People could use the machines to make socks for the war effort and, after they filled a certain quota, they could keep the machine. Unfortunately, good quality metal was not available during the war, so many wartime knitting machines are now warped and do not knit very well.

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The knitting machined that makes socks!​

Where they make the woolen quilts​

Sewing said:

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Washing

Producers bring raw wool to us to process. It is called raw wool because it has just been shorn off of the sheep and no processing has been done to it yet. Producers shear the sheep at least once a year; the result is a fleece that weighs between 5 and 10 pounds depending on the size and breed of sheep, and has fibers between 1 1/2 to 5 inches in length. Wool that contains a small amount of vegetable matter can be cleaned without heavy use of chemicals.

For more information about where our raw wool comes from, read our blog, The Canadian Wool We Use and How it is Grown.

The Custom Woolen Mills wash system is originally from the mill in Sifton, Manitoba. We start by hand-sorting the raw fleece and feeding it into a "duster" that pulls it into tulfts and allows short wool fibres, dirt, and vegetable matter to drop off into a collection bin. The tufts of wool are then fed into what is called a two-bowl wash system; a wash tank with detergent and a rinse tank with pure water. We use a mild, plant-based, biodegradible detergent to help remove dirt and manure that may be in the wool. Wool grease (or lanolin, when refined) is a secretion from the sheep's sebaceous glands that is present in raw wool. Most of the wool grease is washed out by using water heated past the lanolin melting point (120F). The wool fibres, dirt, and vegetable matter from the duster collection bin and the manure that settles to the bottom of the wash tanks are later combined with straw and composted; wool is high in nitrogen content and creates excellent compost that also holds moisture.

Once the wool is washed it is put in a centrifuge to spin out excess water and then dried.

Larger industrial mills use systems with several bowls containing various chemicals to remove vegetable matter, whiten, moth proof, or superwash treat the wool. At Custom Woolen Mills, we do not use these processes because we believe they are hard on the environment, have unknown longterm consequences to human health, weaken the wool fibres, and reduce the effectiveness of wool's natural qualities. As a result, while we work very hard to minimize the amount of vegetable matter in our finished products by carefully hand-sorting the fleeces prior to washing, some vegetable matter remains. All of our white wool products are a natural white colour, not a bleached white.

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Thars a useful tidbit...120F is the melting point for lanolin...kewl!

Doggone & Chicken UP!

Tara Lee Higgins
Higgins Rat Ranch Conservation Farm, Alberta, Canada

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