Product Development: Narrow Woven Wool Tape Edge
Posted on: July 26th 2024
This project was driven by the demand from the market to create a narrow-woven mattress tape edge that embraced natural, eco-friendly properties. In addition to this, the narrow-woven mattress tape edge also needed to be fire retardant, without the use of harmful chemicals. Narrow weaving looms are designed primarily to work with polyester, polypropylene and similar man-made yarns such as Kanecaron. These yarns either require FR chemical treatment and/or emit toxic chemicals should they be exposed to fire. Fire retardant chemicals have been linked to neurological damage, hormone disruption and cancer.
Cotton yarn, whilst being a natural and weaving loom friendly thread, was a non-starter as it is highly flammable. Narrow weaving with wool (which is inherently FR) presented a series of challenges as normally wool is knitted rather than woven.
We needed to source a wool yarn that offered the strength of man-made yarns and was appropriate for weaving. Bespoke modifications needed to be made to our looms and weaving speeds needed to be moderated. We also had to overcome the problem that the fibrous nature of wool yarn presented (as against man-made yarns). This involved investing in extraction facilities around the loom to combat the constant build-up of wool fibres as the loom was in operation (see picture attached illustrating wool fibre debris at the loom head after only one hour of weaving). We finally concluded that we also needed to create a dedicated production area, well away from our standard man-made yarn tape production looms to further contain the wool fibres.
A further advantage of the wool yarn is that it can be dyed in relatively small batch quantities (approx. 20,000m). This has enabled us to offer our customers the option of tape edge in bespoke colours with much smaller MOQ’s than with synthetic yarns. Only organic dyes are used in this process with Global Organic Textile Standard certification (GOTS)
To find out more about our Narrow Woven Wool Tape Edge or any of our other range of products please get in touch with a member of the sales team today!
