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Women love silk and cashmere fabrics.  Or so my research indicates.  And these scientifically determined research truths are verified by my personal truth sayer…my wife.  As a matter of fact, she prefers cashmere to anything else in the world. The five or six other women I’ve discussed the matter with seem to agree.  Cashmere is pretty good stuff.

This is strange to me since silk comes from worms and cashmere comes from goats.  Neither species is a favorite with women in these creatures; tree or barnyard raw state.  And cashmere doesn’t have to come from Himalayan goats either.  Most goats are suppliers of cashmere wool.

I’ll discuss more about silk in later blogs.  Let’s follow the goat path.  Allow me to be your goatherd.  This is beginning to sound like the earthiness of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.

Yes, the goat eating the tin can in the children’s books can produce wool suitable for manufacturing cashmere yarn; the products of which sell for thousands of dollars.  But it’s not as simple as with sheep which are sheared twice a year—avoiding the bad bits—and wash the wool well.  Goats grow two types of hair: an undercoat which is fine and soft and is used for cashmere yarn and then there is the outer coat called “Guard Wool”.  Guard wool is coarse and used for the bristles of some hair brushes.  That application gives one pause doesn’t it?

So, the goat’s hair is either sheared off like sheep’s wool or combed off which is a several day, tedious process.  The image of combing out the goat hair for several days makes my wrists hurt.  But, if the timing is right, the soft cashmere wool will come out easily with combing and reduces the steps required to separate guard wool from cashmere.  Then the cashmere wool is processed through the mill where it is spun into cashmere yarn. 

I’ll admit that cashmere is indeed soft.  Cashmere is warm. I heard a noted woman clothing designer a while ago ecstatically claiming that cashmere wool takes color better than most other materials.  And, above all, women love its feel on them in just about any format.  There are cashmere throws, blankets, comforters, and, of course, sweaters, scarves, and coats, and a myriad of garments for both women and men.   I’ll take a cashmere blanket or sweater any day.

In all fairness to sheep’s wool, it must be acknowledged that moths show no preference for cashmere over sheep’s wool.  Moths simply love it all.  Baa, baa!