19th April 2023 - One bag of Peruvian Wool

 I am a knitter and a spinner of fleeces, this hobby, call it what you may, is a part of my life.  Nothing too elaborate, it has to be easy but relaxing.  At the moment I am knitting a lemon jumper with two balls of wool, one is a mix of wool/alpaca, the other mohair/silk, it makes a 'haze' around the finished garment and to my mind must be warm as it traps air as well.  The brand name is Drops, and their wools come mainly from South America from Peru and doesn't use chemicals to wash the wools.  

Well recently in my F/B news, there has been a lot of news of Saltaire, home to the great Salt Mills, once considered the biggest wool mill in the world, now of course its great cavernous spaces are used for exhibitions and various retail shops.  

We went to a David Hockney exhibition last year here.  Sir Titus Salt, a philanthropist built this great mill but also created the town of Saltaire for his employees and their rather lovely terraced houses will be another blog, should I ever get round to going there again.  Though,  it has been proposed in a couple of years time we should move there.

But that is neither here nor there, what came from reading up about Sir Titus Salt is the fact that he experimented with Alpaca wool, it was a weft and warp problem, which he finally solved by using the alpaca wool as the weft, and either cotton or silk as the warp.  His jotting down of his experiments can be found in the Day Book, contents of which are not recorded on the net.

What seemed forgotten in all this though is that his son the younger Titus Salt Junior staged an exhibition to finance a School of Art and Science building, which sadly caused financial problems but it was a large exhibition featuring many things.  I read about this in this article in The Telegraph and Argus.