Mon truc fétiche
Cashmere is one of my favorite materials. Much warmer than wool and so soft, a dream! Once you tried it, you will not be able to live without it anymore.
Cashmere comes from the hair of a goat that lives mainly in Mongolia and the very northern part of China, which is called Inner Mongolia. I travelled there to discover the goats and the procedures of the yarn production. After a never ending journey I arrived in a nearly lunar landscape with unlimited horizons.
The weather was beautiful but terribly cold. The majority of the country was covered with kind of dry looking tundra and beside some agglomerations built of concrete; the peasants in the country side are living in real yurts, round shaped tents. I felt like being in the middle of nowhere and all we are considering as evident and acquired in our 21st century seems to be very far or even nonexistent. There is the might beauty of the nature, the natural kindness of the people and there are the goats, herds of them, everywhere!
One feels like an alien arriving on earth, at least this is how the people look at you, but fearless. To celebrate our arrival, a sheep is killed in front of us as a welcome sign and by our return from the visit in the fields a very basic meal is served in a yurt heated with a charcoal stove.
No car can reach the herds of goats and there is no other choice than ride on a horseback. The horses are stumbling on the uneven ground of the tundra where there is not even the smallest path.
The goats live in liberty, and travel over the plains followed by their herdsman, feeding on the little grass they can find but which of course is organic!
To collect the precious fuzz they are wearing, the goats are brushed once a year around en may. The result is rough, with an aspect and a hand feel which is very far away from what we know as cashmere because of lots of impurities, long dry cover hair and dirt.
The much desired soft fiber is lying in fact under the long hair of the goats; it is close to their bodies to protect them from the cold of the long winter. This is why the goats are brushed only once a year, at the beginning of spring.
Once in the spinning mills, huge machines equipped with cylinder-shaped brushes will separate the thick hair from the soft one. In average you can say that one goat, brushed once a year is producing around 200 grams of pure cashmere of premium quality, the one we know. To talk in garments it would correspond to the quantity used to knit one plain woman’s sweater in medium size. This explains partially the quite high price of this material. The cashmere items I am selling on this website are coming from Inner Mongolia and are produced by the people I have met there. I am purchasing them directly from them and this is why I am able to offer you a superior quality with a reasonable price.
