Another Coat

This coat fabric turned into more of an adventure than I expected. 

Up until this fabric, all of the wool I had worked with fulled.  Some more than others, but they could all be made to full.

And so when I bought this lovely blue/green worsted yarn, it was with the intent of fulling it to make a warm winter coat.

This particular worsted wool did not full.  Period.

I tried everything.  I used hot water, the most vigorous of the washing cycles on my machine and ran the fabric through the complete wash/rinse cycle not once but several times. 

With the result of.....window screening.

Then I remembered that a friend had said that they threw running shoes into the washer if they really wanted to beat a woolen cloth up and get it to full.  I didn't have any running shoes I wanted to sacrifice so I started thinking of something else I could do.

I had a lot of the tubes from yarn purchased from Maurice Brassard that were rough so I tossed the wet fabric into the dryer along with about 18 of these tubes and let her rip.  Poor Doug nearly had a fit at the noise! 

But the tubes managed to beat the cloth up enough that loose fibres came to the surface of the cloth and it became quite fuzzy.  The cloth was then put back into the washing machine with hot water and allowed to agitate again until the surface fuzz fulled together enough to give the cloth stability.

I didn't want a fuzzy coat so once it was dry I got a large sweater shaver and shaved the surface, leaving the nap on the 'inside' to help provide some insulation.

The coat was sewn by Darlene who recommended a lining fabric called kasha.  Kasha has a rayon surface with a fuzzy back.  This fabric would also help provide insulation against the cold.