Woollyback

Wool

Wool is the textile fiber obtained from sheep and certain other animals, including cashmere from goats, mohair from goats, qiviut from muskoxen, angora from rabbits, and other types of wool from camelids.

Wool has several qualities that distinguish it from hair or fur: it is crimped, it is elastic, and it grows in staples (clusters).

Characteristics

Wool's scaling and crimp make it easier to spin the fleece by helping the individual fibers attach to each other, so they stay together. Because of the crimp, wool fabrics have greater bulk than other textiles, and they hold air, which causes the fabric to retain heat. Wool has a high specific heat coefficient, so it impedes heat transfer in general. This effect has benefited desert peoples, as Bedouins and Tuaregs use wool clothes for insulation.

Felting of wool occurs upon hammering or other mechanical agitation as the microscopic barbs on the surface of wool fibers hook together.

The amount of crimp corresponds to the fineness of the wool fibers. A fine wool like Merino may have up to 100 crimps per inch, while the coarser wools like karakul may have as few as one or two. In contrast, hair has little if any scale and no crimp, and little ability to bind into yarn. On sheep, the hair part of the fleece is called kemp. The relative amounts of kemp to wool vary from breed to breed and make some fleeces more desirable for spinning, felting, or carding into batts for quilts or other insulating products, including the famous tweed cloth of Scotland.

Wool (disambiguation)

Wool is the fibre commonly produced from sheep

Wool (the fiber) refers to one of the following:

Literature

Organizations

People

Miscellanea

Wool (band)

Wool was a rock band from Washington, D.C. (but based in Los Angeles), specialising in a rough hewn but melodic brand of punk-based hard rock from 1990-1996.

History

Wool formed in the early '90s when brothers Peter and Franz Stahl (vocals/guitar and guitar/vocals, respectively) were forced to terminate their popular band Scream when bassist Skeeter Thompson went AWOL and drummer Dave Grohl joined Seattle grunge band Nirvana mid-way through a U.S. tour. The brothers then teamed up with former Government Issue and future Burning Airlines drummer Peter Moffett and Seattle native and ex-Concrete Blonde bassist Al Bloch (brother of Seattle Sub-Pop legend Kurt Bloch from the Fastbacks).

The quartet's first single "Little Darlin'", is a widely regarded punk single. Then, the band released an EP, 1992's rollicking Budspawn, which was released independently on External Records. The material on Budspawn combined the four members' inherent punk aesthetics with a tendency toward more straight-ahead, anthemic hard rock and drug-induced psychedelia.