Interiors home | Wool fabric overview | Types of wool fabrics

Comfort. Softness. Limitless design potential. Safety and durability. All around the world, people choose to live with wool.

Wool fabrics will stand up to years of everyday family wear and tear and still bounce back. They will maintain a clean and ‘as new’ appearance for much longer than other fibre type fabrics.

Upholstery is more exposed to greasy soiling because of the frequent handling it receives, especially on the arms of chairs. Wool’s ability to resist soiling and shed soil during cleaning allows wool fabrics to retain their appearance when others become matted and dirty.

Wool’s inherent resistance to flame and heat make it one of the safest of all upholstery fibres. And wool can readily absorb and dissipate the body’s perspiration, preventing the build-up of heat and dampness.

These are the reasons why wool-rich fabrics have been chosen in cars and all forms of public transport and office interiors. Wool is the natural choice for soft furnishings because of its comfort and warmth, long-life performance ratings and safety factors.

More than any other fabric on earth - wool combines luxury and fabric performance due to its appearance retention, tactile properties, drape, elasticity and wrinkle resistance.

Pile Fabrics

Wool pile upholstery fabrics are, in the majority of cases - woven.

Wool velours or velvets are generally used in public transport such as trains and long distance coaches or in theatres, cinemas and restaurants. The upright, resilient pile of from 2 to 6mm (one twelth to one quarter of an inch) gives excellent appearance retention, in the same way as a wool carpet pile does. The pile can be cut or loop, or a combination of the two. The terms moquette, fries, or epingle are sometime used to describe loop pile cloths.

Face yarns are always spun and the backing yarns are generally cotton or cotton/polyester.

The pile is created from warp threads fed either from a specially prepared roll or beam or from individual spools of yarn mounted in a creel behind the loom.

There are two basic techniques of manufacture; single plush and double plush. In single plush, one fabric is created and it is possible to have loop pile, cut pile or a combination of the two. In double plush, two cloths are woven face-to-face and slit as they leave the loom. Only cut pile is possible.

Knitted Fabrics

A high-speed method of pile fabric production is via a warp pile knitting technique. The pile yarns are well anchored by the equivalent of a W interlacing and back coating is not required. Single and double raschel knitting machines exist. Double bar raschel allows two fabrics to be knitted face to face and slit.

Double bar raschel knitted fabrics have the natural stretch properties of knitted structures and this makes the cloths very suitable for highly contoured or moulded seating such as in automobiles.

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