Blending

Blending wools at a Witney mill, 1898.

This is the stage where clean wools of different qualities, lengths and colours are mixed together. Wools are blended for several reasons: to combine different grades in order to achieve a certain quality or finish, to mix together fibres of the same grade, or to mix them with other types of fibres such as cotton.

Much of the final quality of a Witney blanket was achieved by the careful blending of the different sorts of wool. Several sorts may have been needed for each blanket run and it was the blanket makers' skill, experience and record keeping that allowed them to produce the high quality and consistent standards of the finished product.

Most wool would have been supplied by merchants who sorted it so that each bale was made up of one type of wool. A blend to make a particular yarn consisted of several different bales chosen to produce the right quality and price. At the mill the bales were opened and the wool spread out on the floor in a square, then a stack built up in a regular pattern of layers from all the different types of wool to mix them evenly. Once the blend was complete it was pulled down in armfuls from top to bottom of the pile.

Clare Sumner