WOOL LITERACY, is a weekly series that we hope will get readers a little more literate with wool. Our teacher is none other than Peggy Hart, Founder of Bedfellows Blankets.

In the next few weeks, we will look at a series of mostly forgotten woolen fabrics, more or less in the order in which they were manufactured in the U.S.: flannel, broadcloth, satinet, kersey, cassimere.
Our association with flannel today is the fuzzy, plain weave cotton fabric from which shirts and sheets are made. However, it was originally a wool fabric, woven with a twill construction. The common feature of the two is the finishing, a napped and sheared surface which gives a soft hand.

Flannels were one of the first wool fabrics to be manufactured in the US, with companies such as Stevens in Andover MA, which began in 1814 and continued for more than 100 years. Other companies such as Botany, of Passaic NJ, made flannels well into the 1950s. Flannels were a staple, used for everything from underwear to tennis whites.

About our Wool Literacy teacher:
Peggy Hart is a production weaver and teacher who designs, produces, and markets hundreds of blankets each year including custom blankets for sheep and alpaca farmers using their own yarn. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, worked as a weaver in one of the last mills in Rhode Island, and has woven for the last thirty years on Crompton and Knowles W-3 looms. She has a special affinity for wool, and her book Wool: Unraveling an American Story of Artists and Innovation was published in December of 2017.
Read more about her here.