Blog 2025 Part Two
If there is anything you'd like addressed, please let me know.
THANKS FOR BEING HERE!
Debby has been after me to take some time off anyway!
Everything has "a month" now, so, why not wool? OCTOBER IS WOOL MONTH, in the UK, at least. Brought to us by King Charles and the Campaign for Wool and by British Wool. Of course, I think we ought to follow suit, and October is a good month for it. Really, here in Jersey, November, March and April are the months where woolens really DO THEIR THING ... those months are NOT the coldest but they are chilly and humid. I always feel that HUMID-COLD is where wool shines brightest. Humid-Cold is why we have a lot of customers on the Gulf Coast. It's funny hearing guys from Montana and Wyoming say how CRAZY COLD it is in Mississippi or Alabama or Louisiana.
The proliferation of selling aids and their ads sent my way continues. I just saw an ad from Hypersonix.ai, who says: "Stay Ahead with Hypersonix's Competitive Pricing and Insights Solutions. Retail success begins with knowing your competition. Hypersonix delivers advanced eCommerce price comparison software with AI competitive pricing to empower smarter decisions and drive profitability. Transform Your Pricing Strategy with Hypersonix. Hypersonix offers purpose-built solutions to help retailers optimize pricing, track competition, and gain actionable insights that deliver profitable results." They go on like this for a while. I still have not seen ads or been approached by companies offering to help us improve the product. And I don't believe that "Retail success begins with knowing your competition." I'm not even sure I could point to direct competition. BUT ... we're a long way from what I would call RETAIL SUCCESS. So, maybe they are right.
Shopify, the platform that supports this website, has recently added SIDEKICK, an AI assistant. Cody pointed this out to me a few days ago. I just asked Sidekick how many of this month's orders valued over $10 came from new customers versus returning customers. I'd been feeling that we are getting a high percentage of orders from new customers lately, and I wanted to ignore exchanges and Fabric Samples. Sidekick says 60% returning customers and 40% new. And I know some of the returning customers also placed their first order this month. I want our business to grow, and I want to help intro wool to people who have not worn it before. So I am happy with this data. I also asked how long Sidekick has been available to me. Sidekick didn't know, which is kinda funny.
The University of Wyoming College of Agriculture, of which the Sheep Program is part, is having their annual GIVING DAY on October 23-24. Sheep and Wool research can use all the help it can get, and UWYO is home to some very dedicated Sheep People!
This morning was Opening Day of Duck Season in Jersey, and Opening Day of Muzzleloader Season in Pennsylvania. Debby will be visiting family in Wyoming shortly, so I decided to stay local. I'm not much of a waterfowler, particularly since my dog died. But my friend Dan was keen to go, and he was taking his friend Thor for his first duck hunt. I arrived late, then spent a couple of hours just easing my way around, LIKE A BIG BOY SCOUT (as a friend described it), without raising the shotgun. I saw a Pileated Woodpecker, which I seldom see there. Also a Kingfisher, another bird I seldom see there but I'm told are very plentiful. One of the most remarkable sights and sounds are the immense flocks of migrating birds. Today, a hint of what is to come soon ... a strange, roaring sound and then the arrival of a large number (maybe 1000?) of grackles. A couple of hawks flew very close to me, which is weird. I don't know my hawks but I think these were sharp-shinned. Eventually I met up with Dan and Thor, who each took his limit of three wood ducks! And Dan found a whitetail buck deadhead ... a buck that died with his antlers firmly attached to his skull. This buck had died next to our pond, from unknown causes, but he had the biggest set of antlers we'd seen there. It's quite possible the buck was killed by Chronic Wasting Disease or Epizootic Hermorrhagic Disease, both of which have been killing deer recently. Deer numbers, I think, are much-reduced from 20 years ago. It was really interesting to hear Thor tell about his family's organization Hunters Helping the Hungry. They donate about 40,000 pounds (18,000 kg) of venison annually!! I'll be in touch again with Thor to get more info on HHH.
Ivy's post seems to have earned us a bunch of new followers on Instagram.
Seven months ago, we purchased two used Jacquard Looms that, eventually, will enable us to weave our Fabric much faster than now. But the Looms were not optimized for the yarn we use, so we had to buy new harnesses. And although I had a general idea of what the harnesses do, better to double-check. Tons of info is available on the web. According to grok.com:
Our Whipcord Shirts have been really well-received, and the first run, all in Black, sold out. We're making more Whipcord Shirts in Drab Green now, and expect to ship those in November. And I've just set up another run of Black Whipcord Shirts. Website is accepting payment now for January shipment. Our Whipcord is 100% WeatherWool Certified Fine Wool, of course. Whipcord Fabric is woven with worsted yarn, and is smooth and cool to the touch, and noted for it's durability. These Shirts are dressy or casual.
Yesterday, I walked a mile or so on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, from 42nd Street up to 62nd Street ... New York City's prime shopping and priciest storefronts.
In yesterday's entry, I forgot to mention another style of hunting that I have been employing for a few years.
(Correcting the entry of the 10th.) The company that billed me for our harnesses (for our new/used looms) is Italian, and Raffaele Falciai, the broker/consultant helping us make this happen is Italian, and the harnesses are made in Italy ... so I thought the harnesses were shipping from Italy. But for logistical reasons, the harnesses are actually shipping (by air!) from Spain. So I had to correct the Blog entry from a couple of days ago. So I guess this means they traveled by truck or train through France to Spain. Somehow, that makes me appreciate the harnesses a little more.
If I hadn’t been both an office-worker in a suit and a hunter since my youth, WeatherWool would not have come about. I’m not in a suit anymore, and my youth remains only between my ears. But I am still a little bit of a hunter … October and the Hunter’s Moon still definitely get to me.
At this point, I’d actually rather work on WeatherWool than hunt, but I still feel driven to put some venison in the freezer. In 2019, the year I turned 65, Pennsylvania started what I call GRANPA SEASON. For three days, well in advance of what PA hunters call RIFLE SEASON, the old folks can hunt antlerless deer with modern rifles. I’ve never hunted for antlers, and a lot of people think the does are better eating. Maybe. But I do appreciate the females tend to be smaller, and easier for me to load into the truck if I’m alone. So I look forward to the PA early firearms season. The first few days of this season are muzzleloader-only, and I’ve taken a bunch of deer with the muzzleloader. Last year, I had two antlerless tags, and actually filled both before Granpa Season started.
Because of WeatherWool, I talk to a lot of customers … usually at least a few each day. One thing I’ve learned is that there are a great many perspectives on why and how to hunt. Wild Foods has always been the biggest reason for me to hunt. I do love just being “out there”, but the acquisition of Wild Foods has always added a fundamental satisfaction to outdoors skills. Some guys have no interest in Wild Foods. I’ve gone fishing with guys who don’t eat fish. Perfect fishing companion for me! I knew a guy who was a real Huntin’ Fool who killed about 25 deer a year with his bow. (We have virtually unlimited deer hunting in New Jersey.) He donated ALL of the venison to the needy. Another guy here in South Orange also took about 25 whitetails per year and his family of 11 consumed every bit of those animals. I also know guys who are trophy hunters … they are hunting only for the largest and/or oldest males. People who dislike hunting generally hold the most antipathy toward trophy hunting. But the trophy hunters are the ones least likely to actually kill anything, because they are hunting rare animals that are usually much warier than the younger ones. And, in every State, it is illegal to wantonly waste meat. I know some people believe trophy hunters take only the trophy-part and leave the meat. (Some POACHERS will do that, tho.)
It's typical that authorities will institute different hunting seasons and different regulations based on the type of weapon. Here in Jersey, bow season (that is, bow and arrow AND crossbow and bolt) runs from about September 10 to about February 20. That’s an ultra-long season. Some guys hunt with a bow because they completely love the bow, and have no interest in firearms for Jersey whitetails. Other guys hunt with a bow because they can get into the woods a lot sooner. Some bowhunters completely despise the crossbow, insisting it’s not a bow at all, and shouldn’t even be permitted during bow season. And some States do in fact regulate the crossbow separately from the vertical bow. The crossbow is quite different, and much easier to master. But even among the vertical bow guys, there are factions. The modern compound bow, which was virtually unknown prior to about 1970, is far easier to hunt with than is a recurve bow … which is easier (less difficult, really) to hunt with than a longbow. Of course, it’s the arrow that carries the arrowhead (hunting arrowheads for deer are called broadheads), and the arrowhead does the killing. There are many types of arrowheads, and there are many types of arrows. Most of the trad-gang (traditional archers who use recurve or longbow) will shoot the most high-tech arrows and broadheads. Wooden arrows are very prone to warping, and warped arrows are a real problem for hunting.
Regardless of choice of weapon, there are also a bunch of ways to hunt. A lot of people shooting arrows or bolts will say firearm hunting is too easy. But those same people will use every other edge available. Almost all of them hunt from trees (treestands) because the height results in an increased field of view, less obstructing brush, and less chance the quarry will “bust” them. But then why not hunt from the ground, the old-fashioned way? A friend of mine hunts from the ground using bows and arrows and stone arrowheads he makes himself. Now, THAT’s a challenge! The downside of the challenge is that you may wind up eating “tag soup”, as they say. My friend had an elk within six steps last year, but couldn’t seal the deal. I don’t know how he fared this year.
My preferred way of hunting whitetail has always been what is paradoxically called “still-hunting”, which does not mean staying still. Still-hunting is moving through the forest as stealthily as possible, hoping to get a shot before the deer knows you are there. But you do stop frequently, sometimes for several minutes, because deer are amazingly good at remaining unseen until they move. Still-hunting is different from stalking, because stalking means closing the distance on an animal that you’ve already seen. Still-hunting can sometimes involve stalking a little closer, or maybe to change an angle. But where I normally still-hunt, whether at The Swamp or a farm in Pennsylvania where I’m permitted, the forest is so thick that any deer you can see is already in range of a firearm. I personally much prefer to hunt this way … closing within range of a deer, a very keen animal, in its own domain … a deer that you didn’t even know was there until you were within 50 or 70 yards (45 – 65 meters) or sometimes even 20 steps is a challenge I enjoy. BUT, not so challenging that I will spend large amounts of time without any venison. I think around six hours of still-hunting per deer. At The Swamp, I usually only hunt for 2-4 hours because I have too much else to do, but also because I can’t keep the focus necessary for still-hunting for more than a couple of hours. Usually, I like to get into the woods before first light … I absolutely love witnessing night turn into day. I will pick a likely spot for an ambush and wait until the sun is bright before I move. Even in good light, deer can be very difficult to see. Moving in low light, at least for me, is just foolishness. And I’m very lucky to have great night-vision (for a human). Sometimes, I will have my deer before the light is good enough for me to start moving. That's fine, I will gladly accept what Nature gives me.
AND … !! … AND … if you are going to wear any clothes at all, wool is the best clothing for still-hunting. One of the reasons we made Cargo Shorts is because a good customer, a very serious guy, still-hunts with traditional archery equipment, barefoot, in minimal clothing. He says wool is the quietest fabric, but not as quiet as NO fabric. So he wanted shorts. I think he hunts shirtless, even in cold weather. He’s an extreme guy who also does ultra-marathons. And if I can remember his name (it will come to me eventually!), I'll make sure he knows about the Shorts!
So … a week from now, I should be in the deer woods again. Debby’s been pushing me to take one day a week off … MAYBE!!
I love that we’ve named the moons … and Hunter’s Moon is a great name. I did not intend to write about this, but I mentioned the Hunter’s Moon at the top of today’s blog. I just looked this up … people have been naming the moons for something like 5000 years, which is nice to know and not at all surprising. Here in the mainland USA we have some pretty-well accepted names, and some I'd not heard before. I start the list in March because my favorite moon-names are in Winter. Most of this info comes from TimeAndDate.com, which has a lot of cool stuff:
- March: Worm Moon ……. The last Full Moon of the winter season in March is the Worm Moon because of the earthworms that come out when the soil warms up. Native American tribes called it the Crow Moon for the crows coming back, Snow Crust Moon, and Sap and Sugar Moon for when the maple sap runs. The Anglo-Saxons called it Lenten Moon after the Germanic Lenten for spring. The Celts called it the Wind Moon and Plough Moon. In Old English, it was known as the Death Moon and the Chaste Moon referring to the purity of the spring season. Death Moon is a tough name but March can be the hardest month of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Here in Jersey, green-up starts in March.
- April: Pink Moon. I don’t even remember hearing the names for the April Moon before … April has the Full Pink Moon, from the pink phlox wildflowers that bloom in North America in the early spring. The Native American names referred to the spring thaws and the return of growth, including Breaking Ice Moon and The Moon of the Red Grass Appearing. Common names in Europe also referred to the budding and birth of spring: The Anglo-Saxons called it Egg Moon, the Celts had names like Budding Moon, New Shoots Moon, Seed Moon, and Growing Moon
- May: Flower Moon … obvious call. Also, Budding Moon, Egg Laying Moon, and Planting Moon (I like that!). The Anglo-Saxon name is Milk Moon, while the Celtic and Old English names are Mothers’ Moon, Bright Moon, Hare Moon, and Grass Moon.
- June: Strawberry Moon is appropriate to New Jersey!
- July: Buck Moon (never heard of that one, either) to signify the new antlers that emerge on deer buck’s foreheads around this time. Other Native American tribes call it Salmon Moon, Raspberry Moon, and Thunder Moon (I will try to remember that one!). In Celtic, Mead Moon. The Anglo-Saxons called it the Hay Moon.
- August: Sturgeon Moon … another name I don’t remember hearing. But in this part of the USA, sturgeon were an extremely important food source
- September: Harvest Moon, Corn Moon. Both those names work here in Jersey, although early-corn is in July
- October: The Hunter’s Moon. A very big deal for a lot of our ancestors
- November: Beaver Moon because beavers are really cranking up their activity to prepare for winter. OK ... another new name for me
- December: Cold Moon. No explanation needed, although I would say January is colder around here
- January: Wolf Moon, from the howling of hungry wolves in the winter. This name is thought to have a Celtic and Old English origin, and that European settlers brought it to North America. From what I hear, though, the coldest days of winter are when the wolves are doing best. I think maybe they are howling because it’s party-time. A friend tells me the wolves of Yellowstone, which has extreme winter weather, are living their best, eating the most food, in the worst of winter
- February: Hunger Moon … No explanation needed for that one. I can really picture people of centuries back struggling through the cold and lack of food in February.
We sent out our newsletter on Friday, and this morning I got an email from a recipient:
You don’t need my phone number to mail an order. That’s the sole reason I don’t order from you. It’s obvious you’ll sell people’s information without their consent.
I actually didn’t realize the checkout required a phone number, even though it says OPTIONAL. I believe I have changed the setting so the phone number is now truly optional. UPS may phone if they have a delivery problem, so the phone number is still a good idea. I wonder how many others have disliked that phone-number requirement!! Probably a bunch!! So I owe my suspicious non-customer a THANK YOU. And if anyone is wondering, we don’t sell the mail list. We wouldn’t sell the mail list. I don’t think anyone has ever even approached us to buy the mail list. But I get several offers a week from people SELLING mail lists. I’ve never bought a mail list either. Mailing to people who did not request sounds like the fastest way to put WeatherWool into email-jail.
As for Mr Suspicious, my email response thanked him for letting me know about the (formerly) required phone number. I also informed that we don’t sell customer info … and explained that we don’t want to work with anyone who does not trust us/me, and that I deleted his email from our list. He’d not made a purchase in the five years since he signed up.
Yesterday was a longish day on the road up to Massachusetts and then American Woolen. An early start is important to get across the George Washington Bridge and through New York City before most people are active. I crossed the Bridge by 5:30 and didn't hit any traffic until Massachusetts. There was a crash on I-95 though, and while following the GPS re-route I drove through some truly beautiful, lush Rhode Island farm country. I've hardly spent any time at all in Rhode Island, so the re-route was sort of a nice bonus. While driving the detour, I was speaking with a customer who will soon be doing an archaeological tour of Crete. I did relate that we have a good customer living on Crete. But I didn't reflect until just now that the ancient history of Crete is closely intertwined with the ancient history the Mediterranean Island of Rhodes. I've never been to either place.
Yesterday, I got a call from Chance Painter, one of the featured Mountain Men on History Channel's long-running series. Chance wanted to let me know that Soraya, his wife, had sewn a dress from some Charcoal Denim Fabric that Debby had sent her.
Following from the previous entry ... another surprising name for a clothing brand is ACNE STUDIOS. It sounds more like a name for a dermatologist office to me. But maybe I'm just a sourpuss ... the website shows a flock of thin (I'm jealous), twenty-something (REALLY jealous!), non-smiling (they can be jealous of me on this one; they ought to appreciate being thin and young!!) guys without complexion issues. Acne must be a good name, though, as their annual sales are over 350 million Euros.
Just wanted to say thank you so very much! HoodOrak came today and I absolutely love it! Will be a return customer for sure. With gratitude, --- MT
We are grateful, too!!!!!
The email-bombing robot added me to the subscriber-list of Shabby Fabrics. This seems a very very weird name for a fabrics company. Similarly, there is another company named Shoddy Threads. There is a (cotton) denim company named SoSo. I don't understand choosing these names!
YEAH ... and unfortunately the MORE TO IT is often due to anti-scoundrel measures. I did not understand, and did not try to find out, why some sites protect their email signup. I wanted our signup to be as simple as possible.
We do speak with a lot of people in the Military and Veterans and people working on Military projects. This evening we had a visit from Mike who is working on a Military contract concerned with acoustics. This morning, I got a great note and photo from Drew, who is serving on the USS Vermont, a Navy Sub. The Vermont, a "fast attack home ported in Hawaii", is in Alaska now. AK is where subs normally go to check acoustics.
Regarding the boss I mentioned earlier today ... I used to call him GRANPA because he was two weeks older than me. My desk was right outside his office, and I saw a lot of people come and go. One visitor was an old friend, and when he left, my boss said he was a great example of the many people who REALLY FIND THEIR THING AFTER THEY LEAVE MORGAN STANLEY. I loved the trading floor environment but never had a natural interest in the securities biz, and both of my bosses at MS sensed I belonged elsewhere.
Yesterday was very busy Open House and a lot of fun. Thanks to all who were here! Next Open House is 26 October.
- When they STOP asking, that's when you have a problem
- If a partner makes the request, take care of it right away
- If the request comes from someone other than a partner, decide if fulfillment is worthwhile, based on my time and overall potential benefits
- Remember that a lot of people will ask for things casually ... might be just a quick thought and not important to them
- If only one person asked only once, don't worry about it
This advice is not directly transferable here but it's useful. Also, I want to AT LEAST get back to everyone, even though we usually can't implement whatever they want, or at least not quickly.
And now, at least, I've gotten back to the gent who wrote me about the Whipcord Fabric.
Tomorrow, Sunday the 28th, is our first Open House of the Season.
- Testing: We'll refund, even after a year or more if the wool does not meet expectations. In practice, this is a near-zero-risk to us and to the customer
- Buybacks: Our garment are assets in the sense that we'll buy them back at 100% if a customer is happy with the wool but simply needs the cash
- Lending Library: People can test used garments for $30, the cost of shipping. About half the items checked out are purchased rather than returned. And the Lending Library is sourced mostly from buybacks from customers who have gained or lost weight. A couple of days ago, we bought back an item from a customer who'd lost a lot of weight since his purchase in 2015. He'd put some real miles on the garment, but it still had plenty of life left in it and we paid him >50% of his original purchase price
Data processing becoming cheaper and cheaper and faster and faster is a great thing, but it's not all good!
- In the last couple of weeks, slimeballs have copied our website onto similar-sounding domains and offered all kinds of stuff at THE BEST PRICE. That is resolved, but there is nothing at all to stop them from doing it again. This type of fraud is actually well-known among web-pros and electronic security people and IP attorneys
- My email was BOMBED with thousands of subscriptions to you-name-it ... subscriptions I never signed up for ... some of the subs require verification, and they will fade away when I don't verify. But others are sending stuff daily. And for some of these subs, hitting UNSUBSCRIBE only makes matters worse, because all they want is to send to a live email address, then they can sell the address to other spammers
- The big-tech search engines keep pushing to become our partners. I don't understand how it works, but I keep getting notices that our products are NOT ACTIVE on google-shop, or something, but that they are seen there by thousands (like >100,000) people per day. I never gave permission to google-shop to show our products
- I just got a report telling me that >1000 people visited our site this month as a result of paid searches on google. Well, maybe, but we never paid google anything. Got to wonder what's going on there ...
- I'm always prompted to set up my sales channels on "Facebook and Instagram". But at least they don't force it. Same with "Google & YouTube"
- Shopify, the platform that supports this website, has their own sales channel, SHOP, that I don't think I ever actually requested or even specifically accepted, but it's active on our store. I really don't know where it came from, but probably I clicked OK on some licensing agreement that was simply TLDR and I decided to trust Shopify because we trust them for so much every day.
- The SHOP app is active for me personally, also. I don't know how that came to be, but I was buying something online and the checkout knew my name and shipping and billing and even credit card info. It certainly made checkout more convenient (as if typing for 20 seconds is an inconvenience!!!), but the first time it happened it was unsettling
- I just noticed links to our Instagram, Facebook and YouTube channels are at the top of our website pages! I suppose Cody or Lindsay did that, but maybe not ... those links used to be only at the bottom of our pages. Normally they would ask me first
- I think we could implement a Shopify Chatbot on our site, but I don't want to do that!
- A week ago I mentioned pay-per-click advertising. We don't advertise anyway, so it's not relevant. But a really creepy thing happens sometimes with the pay-per-click as well as general advertising crowd. Sometimes we'll be talking about something ... something very unusual ... and then a browser pops up an ad for that specific item. I would really hate for people to suspect WeatherWool was sponsoring eavesdropping devices!! The idea of devices that are commercially eavesdropping is really creepy
- And I don't know what the word would be for it, but the cellphones can't work without knowing where we are ... all the time ... and they sell that data
As usual, I'm awake in the wee hours, and wool is on my mind. I don't know if 3:30 AM counts as very early or very late. It's middle of the night for me, in the sense that I'll go back to sleep before starting the regular day's work. Four AM or so is probably the quietest time of day. Almost all the people who are out late have retired, and almost all the early risers are still home. Not that I'm usually going anywhere, but I really appreciate the STILLNESS. When I lived near the Hudson River Waterfront in NYC, I loved to go running (that was about 100 pounds ago) at 3AM. The air was clean and fresh and salty, which is a little bit of a surprise in Manhattan, and the city was as quiet as it ever will be. Although some people were about, as is ALWAYS the case in New York Here in the Jersey 'burbs of NYC, anyone who is out and about owns the landscape. Sometimes I'll invent a reason to take a 4AM walk ... post a piece of snail-mail or get some cash at the bank ... just to enjoy being the only person around.
Today we are shipping our first order to Georgia (the Country), THANKS to DIMITRI! Yesterday, we shipped to Poland, where we have a few customers. THANKS to MCIEJ for his first order! UPS choked on Mciej's address ... we had to change "ą" to "a". There is a page on this website (Debby will think OF COURSE THERE IS! when she reads this entry) that lists the Countries where we know our wool has been, and GEORGIA is a new entry. We're up to about 74 countries, depending how you count them.
Hooded Jackets in MidWeight Lynx Pattern, part of Batch Innes-1, are in production now, and website will accept payment. Expect to ship at end of November. If you had a SHIP ASAP order in place, you should have heard from me already ... either an invoice or a charge to your card. THANKS to the folks who've been waiting!!!
2025-09-22-AGAIN ... Berry Amendment
I forgot to mention in yesterday's blog (China Error) that another likely source of confusion is that the interlining in question is "Berry-compliant".
Companies wishing to sell to the US Military need their products to comply with the Berry Amendment. Basically, it means components and labor must be American. A buyer for the US Army once told me he needs our wool to be grown by "American sheep eating American grass." If you're not Berry-compliant, Uncle Sam's not buying unless you can get a "Berry-exception". Exceptions are made for various reasons, but the exceptions take time and are granted reluctantly. If a component is vital but not available in USA, for example, a Berry-exception may be granted. The interlining that we stumbled over has a Berry-exception, and maybe that's why/how, in the chain of people we communicated with, our PURE-AMERICAN principle was interpreted to mean Berry-compliant.
So there has now been a WeatherWool-error, but there are no WeatherWool-exceptions. Many times I've heard Debby tell vendors we are "beyond Berry". She is very specific that Berry-noncompliance is an automatic NO for us, but Berry-compliance is not a YES, either. USA only.
2025-09-22 ... Email Bombing Eases ... Wool-Time ... Open House Sunday ... The Odyssey
Fall officially starts today, in the Northern Hemisphere. Our friends in New Zealand and Australia are heading into Spring after typical Winter temps. One of the things I love about Weather is very simply that Nature is Boss and we have to handle whatever comes our way. And (SALESMAN-MODE WARNING!) wool does a great job of handling Weather because "Wool is Clothing Made by Nature".
The first Open House of the season is this coming Sunday, 28 September.
The "email bombing" from last week has subsided quite a bit, but it's not over. I'd never even heard of this before it happened to me, but evidently:
- Malefactors send robots searching the web for places to sign up for emails of various kinds ... newsletters, coupons, sales. Seemingly any sort of sign-up, in any language, worldwide
- The signup sites are collected into some kind of list or database
- A robot goes thru the signup sites submitting the victim's email address
- The signup sites bury the victim's email with requests for verification and other types of mail
The first couple of days (the 17th and 18th of this month) I was so buried with unwanted mails that finding the mails I did want was difficult and I doubtless missed some of them. Since then, it's gotten a lot better because most of the signups require a verification response and stop sending after two or three verification requests.
One funny thing resulted from the bombing ... the bad guys signed me up with Women's Wear Daily, a legendary (over 100 years) publication in the garment industry. I verified that one. WWD is not all that relevant to us, but I've known of it since I started working in financial publishing in 1977. I actually interviewed for an editor's spot at WWD in 1978. Financial publishing and the financial industry itself were never my natural interest, but I liked the people and it was high-energy and sometimes exciting. My 30-minute glimpse of fashion publishing, in the old Fairchild Building just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan's East (Greenwich) Village, was far less attractive than the Madison Avenue (in the old Look Magazine Building!) financial publishing scene.
I just scrolled through the LONG landing page at WWD and of probably 50 photos, only two people were smiling. You're working in FASHION ... don't you LIKE IT? One of the people with a big smile is actress Anne Hathaway. Maybe she's smiling because she's Hollywood and not Fashion.
Anyway, Anne Hathaway reminded me of a call I got last week from a Fine Friend of WeatherWool. I knew he'd been working on a movie for a long time ... turned out he'd just finished working on THE ODYSSEY, starring Hathaway and several other well-known Hollywood folks, directed by Christopher Nolan. The Odyssey is a gigantic production of Homer's ancient epic. It's scheduled for release in July of 2026. I don't know if my friend would want me to say more than that.
2025-09-21 ... MADE IN CHINA ERROR
Being PURE AMERICAN is part of the foundation of our company. But I just found out about a mistake, and had to add the following to the Pure American page:
ON 19 SEPTEMBER 2025 I LEARNED THAT, DUE TO A COMMUNICATIONS ERROR, WE ACCIDENTALLY USED INTERLINING MADE IN CHINA. WE WERE USING THIS PRODUCT FOR A FEW MONTHS, AND DISCONTINUED USE AS SOON AS WE LEARNED ABOUT THE NON-US MANUFACTURE. Interlining is a structural component we use to strengthen buttonholes. Buttonholes are cut into doubled layers of Fabric. In between the two layers of Fabric is a very thin layer of interlining, and we thought the interlining we've been using was made in USA. The interlining bolts are labeled with numbers and English, but no info on origin. There is no way to know from the packaging that this is not an American product. We have visited this company's manufacturing facility in Massachusetts, and actually picked up the interlining in person. We thought it was made at the Massachusetts plant. And this company does make similar products in USA. I can't explain exactly how we wound up using the China-made version. As far as I know, this is the only non-American component we have ever used. In early days, we collected Certifications of Origin from our suppliers, but that probably wouldn't have helped in this situation because we thought we were getting the same manufacturer's similar American product. Because interlining is such a small component in garment manufacture, this Chinese-made interlining is actually acceptable, legally, for use in MADE IN USA clothing. It's not acceptable to us, but maybe that technicality was a factor in the miscommunication between us and the maker.
2025-09-18 ... EMAIL BOMBED
Right now, my email account, Ralph@WeatherWool.com, is being bombed. It's being overwhelmed by garbage emails, many thousands of them, to the point that I cannot find the legitimate notes. I'm working to resolve this, of course, but for the meantime, please phone or text me or contact Debby or Alex. UGH!
2025-09-17 AGAIN ... Five-Pocket Vests
A quick and dirty first-cut of the Five-Pocket Vest page is live.
2025-09-17 ... Open House Sep 28 ... Swamp Visit ... Helping Us Sell ... Dolly and Duke
Sunday, 28 September, is our first Open House of the Season. More people came to Open House seven or eight years ago, when we first had the idea, than recently. I can't explain that.
It is shocking to me how often I'm contacted by people who want us to pay them to show us ways to increase sales:
- Mail lists for sale
- Email and text message consultants and software packages
- Social media consultants and software packages
- Media consultants who will help us get coverage in print, radio, TV, podcasts
- People selling advertising beneath a media veneer. Pay us a bunch of money to appear in our media and we'll "rave about your products"
- Pay-per-click consultants want to show us how to advertise in the search engines ... how to get our ads to pop up when people search for wool, for example ... and we pay a buck or two or more when someone clicks our ad. It's amazing to me how many companies pop-up their pay-per-click listings in response to a search for WeatherWool
- Website consultants want to show us how to make more "conversions" on our website ... how to appeal to different demographics ... what are the terms that people find persuasive
- Up-selling consultants want to show us how to get customers to add additional items to their orders
- Companies who claim our sales will increase if we let them finance our customer's purchases
- Companies who want to show us how to follow up on abandoned shopping carts
- Influencers who claim we'll get more sales if they wear our wool for their YouTube and social media
- Companies that want to put us in their directories of whatever ... outdoor gear, US manufacturing directories ...
- Companies that will put affiliate links to us on their media, or websites, or whatever, and they'll get a commission if someone clicks over to us and purchases
- Companies that will review our products as long as we agree to affiliate-link commissions
- Good, old-fashioned advertising, of course
And there are probably other approaches that I can't think of right now off the top of my head. I hear from these folks every day. But I have only very rarely heard from people who want to help us make better products!! (Only once that I can think of.) There is something wrong with that picture. The ideas for improvement come from our customers, primarily, our most valuable Partners! And our Advisors. THANK YOU!!
Yesterday was such a sweet, late-summer day that I came up with a flimsy reason to abandon the keyboard and visit The Swamp. Debby went too. In the warm months, mosquitoes can make The Swamp unbearable, and it's hard to predict accurately what the skeeter level will be. There were few skeeters last time I visited, but we've had some rain since, and sometimes that brings them out in force. But today, zero skeeters. In fact, virtually zero bugs of any kind. And actually, virtually zero wildlife in evidence. I can't explain that, either. BUT, the place was so beautiful and so peaceful.
Great Blue Heron tracks are huge! And raccoon tracks are everywhere along the water's edge at The Swamp. It's not necessary to be remote, or large, for Nature's beauty, tranquility and abundance to shine.
About three years ago, I noticed robins had nested on this little ledge on our kitchen porch. The robins did not nest successfully -- the nestlings died -- but then doves moved in and things worked out for them. Before the nesting season of 2023, I made the ledge wider, and added a lip to make it more secure. The doves returned and seemed to find the new digs much to their liking. Last year, DOLLY and DUKE nested four times, fledging a pair of chicks each time. Web-search says the doves are cooperative parents, with both male and female incubating eggs and regurgitating crop-milk that enables the squabs to grow amazingly fast.
Both chicks with one of the parents. Another day or two, and they'll be gone from the nest, but will remain close by for another week or two. 
One of the chicks (squabs!) is on the right, and only a little bit of the other chick is visible behind Dolly (or maybe Duke). It's very difficult to distinguish male/female mourning doves. I just looked that up too ... males are slightly bigger and tend to have brighter and more iridescent plumage. Well, not clear here.
I'm sure this fifth nest will be the last of 2025. But if Dolly and Duke survive the winter, I'm sure they'll be back in almost exactly six months. They started the first nest of 2025 on March 20th, or perhaps a day or two earlier and I did not see.
Doves are nowhere near as skittish as many of the other small birds around here. Often the doves will remain wherever they are when the other birds scatter. I guess their strategy is to conserve energy and take their chances. We have huge numbers of doves around here, so they must know what they are doing.
2025-09-16 ... Denim Shemaghs
I just decided to make Shemaghs in Denim ... Charcoal for starters ... expect to ship in November or maybe October.
2025-09-15 ... Correcting the Record on Denim
Until just lately, I had believed we are the only company making and offering 100% Wool Denim. But Brendan M (THANK YOU MUCH!!), responding to our newsletter mailing of 10 September, tipped me to Nikke.JP ... (The website is mostly Japanese, but offers some English-language material. Advisor Jeremiah Goodman looked into the Japanese website for me. THANKS A LOT JEREMIAH!!!) Nikke is a Japanese company, and Japan is famous for great fabrics and for love of Denim. I don't know how long they've been at it, but they seem to be a large company and they offer several kinds of Denim fabrics, plus Jeans. Near as I can tell, they are offering 100% worsted fabric, starting with superfine wool (14.5 micron) wool from New Zealand. Given that they say "100% washable", I think this means the fiber has been superwashed. We very much avoid superwashing, for reasons described on our superwash page. But superwash is the wool-industry standard, because wool is not "easy-care" without superwashing (as far as I know!).
I was wrong to write "WeatherWool is the Global Leader in 100% Wool Denim". I'm almost certain Nikke makes a lot more Denim than we do. But it seems (website is mostly Japanese-language) their Denim is all worsted and all superwashed. So their Denim is quite different from ours. It looks like we are out front in the type of Denim we chose to make. I think we are the "Global Leader in 100% Non-Superwashed, 100% Wool, 100% Woolen-Spun Denim", but that sounds like a lot of wool-geek-speak.
2025-09-14 ... Garden State Sheep Show
Today we attended the annual Garden State Sheep Breeders Show. Historically, New Jersey --The Garden State -- has been home to a great deal of agriculture. And we still have a great many small farms and small ranches. As far as I know, at least, Jersey doesn't have anyone raising the type and quantity of fiber we typically purchase. But there is tremendous popular support here for green space, farming and ranching, so ... maybe!
Jersey does have a wide variety of breeds and fleece though, and I love seeing the youngsters showing their animals. So we attend the GSSB Show every year.
This Young Lady, showing Romeldales from Swayze Inn Farm, gave me permission to use this photo. My sister used to live down the road from Swayze, and since the 1970s, I've known the giant Sycamore Tree, New Jersey's largest, that grows at the entrance. What I didn't know until today was that the tree is 400 years old and has been noteworthy since George Washington spent some time in its shade. I'm hoping to get some meat and maybe even some Naturally Colored fiber from Swayze.
And New Jersey does grow some BEAUTIFUL Nat-Color fiber. Making Nat-Color Fabric will require overcoming some significant challenges, but we're working on it. The essence of the situation is the the traditional, industrial wool processors view anything other than "white wool" as a contaminant.
The main reason Black (or anything but white) Sheep are avoided is simply that you can "dye darker", but you can't "dye lighter". That is, you can dye white fiber any color, but black is going to stay black, regardless of dye. So, a very very very small amount of black fiber mixed in with a fabric of any other color is an obvious flaw.
But Fabric made from this fiber would be soooooo beautiful!!!
2025-09-12 ... Celebration of Life ... On the Road Today
Yesterday evening, Debby and I attended a Celebration of Life for Mike Hillebrand (blog from 2025-09-08). There were hundreds of people in attendance, and Debby and I spent over two hours on line for our chance to spend a minute or two with Mike's widow, sisters and his two children, Megan and Tom. We had spent time with Tom two or three times over the years, and he recognized us immediately, which would have been impressive in any situation, but particularly so at that time. We'd not met Megan previously, but she was familiar with our company and account. Megan will continue her work in MTL personnel, and Tom's prior role in management will, I suppose, expand. Tom and Megan assured us there would be no changes. Brian Kunetz, Product Assurance Manager, spent a few minutes with us. Brian's expertise was vital to our transition from finishing our Fabric at Woolrich to finishing at American Woolen. AWC needs wider greige then Woolrich, and at first it was not clear that the additional width was possible. Brian knew how to get that done. I told Brian that we are working on getting our own looms online at American Woolen, and that Mike had advised us on aspects of the purchase. Brian explained that Mike had already told him and Tom about our plans. I told Brian that even once our own machines come online, we'd likely continue to work with MTL. It was probably a couple of years ago that Brian was watching MOUNTAIN MEN on television and spied our (his!) Lynx Pattern.
I've got to move ... need to be on the road by 4:30 to get to American Woolen by 7:30. I like to get there (and back) before all the traffic!! It seems like rush-hour starts earlier and earlier. Sometimes the traffic is heavy at the George Washington Bridge by 5:30AM. And sometimes it seems the afternoon rush hour starts at 3PM. Especially on Friday!
2025-09-10 ... Fake Website Down (for now) ... Wyoming Wool
Lindsay King, our webmaster, sent a very firm, detailed, authoritative note to CHEAPNAMES.com, the registrar of the fake WeatherWool site, and they quickly took it down. (Yesterday's entry.) But this kind of fraud is quite widespread on the web, and there is virtually nothing to be done about it ... or, at least, nothing to be done about it without a lot more political will, and probably also international cooperation. Basically, all we can do is respond ASAP if this happens again. They tell me large organizations are battling the internet slimeballs constantly. In so many situations these days, scoundrels operate with impunity.
The University of Wyoming Sheep Program and the Wyoming Wool Initiative have published their Annual Report for the year ending in July. We have met with Dr Whit Stewart, Associate Professor and Sheep Specialist at the U of Wyoming, who evidently had a major role in putting together the report. Some highlights:
- Wyoming leads the USA in the value of wool produced. (WY -- the Geis and Innes Ranches -- is by far our largest source of wool)
- There is a strong focus on growing the sheep industry (meat and wool) overall, and in Wyoming especially. There is a strong desire to do more processing of Wyoming wool in Wyoming, and to support and celebrate the people who make it happen
- The Wool Evaluation Contest attracted >130 students from across the USA
- Meat is the main driver of the sheep industry, and UW is bigtime involved. Whit gave us some great lamb chops when we visited!
- Brad and Ryan Boner of M Diamond Angus Ranch earned the Legacy Award as the largest contributors and lamb donors. Brad hosted me at the Sheep Industry Annual Meeting in 2014, and has been wearing one of our Anoraks for two or three years. Eventually, I hope to buy some of Brad's fiber.
- UW continues to work with their counterparts in New Zealand, where the wool industry is a source of national pride
- Wyoming's FIRST traceable, value-added wool shirt was launched by the Wool Shirt Feasibility Study. Whit worked with our friends at Mountain Meadow Wool (of Buffalo, Wyoming), American Woolen in Connecticut and Ferrara Manufacturing in New York City. Our first Batch Innes-1 garments (Whipcord Shirt and Anorak), single-sourced from Wyoming's Innes Ranch, will be shipping soon!
- The Wool Shirt Feasibility Study showed that:
- Consumers value sustainable, American-made products
- More than 90% of consumers prefer shirts supporting local ranchers
- Many consumers are willing to pay above typical pricing for traceable, Wyoming-sourced shirts
- Wyoming has an opportunity to lead in sustainable, value-added wool production
- You can participate in the Feasibility Study Survey at bit.ly/3UYUEHn
- Sheep are very useful at solar-energy installations. The sheep keep vegetation from interfering with the solar panels and operators, and the sheep do not climb on the panels. The panels provide shade for the sheep when needed
- WeatherWool was named as an ALLIED INDUSTRY PARTNER
- And a photo showing why I love Wyoming (besides the fact that we have family and many friends there!):
Wyoming can be as beautiful as anyplace!! Dr Stewart is the guy behind the baby.
2025-09-09 ... Scoundrels ... Newsletter
Cody will be sending the September newsletter today. If you have any input, please LMK! If you want to get on our mailing list, just let me know or use the signup toward the bottom of our home page.
I've been getting strange/surprising phone calls from people who sense something is wrong. They tell me they are on our website, found via a web search, and we have awesome pricing on cement mixers, hydraulic jacks, fencing and other items that we most certainly do not offer. Yesterday, a call came in while we were discussing with Cody, via ZOOM, today's newsletter. The callers, a man and woman working on behalf of their church group, wanted to buy a bunch of picnic tables. They knew something wasn't right before they called, so they were already of a mind to help us figure out what was going on. The man sent some supporting documentation, but most importantly he told us the exact fake website ... which I don't want to actually include here, but, for evidentiary purposes:
weather wool shop dot US
This bogus site somehow mirrors our own site in realtime, or close to it, because it had updates that were only a few hours old. Including this page.
While still zooming with Cody, we conferenced in Lindsay King, our webmaster, who put together a great email to the fraud teams at a couple of companies that might be able to help.
- Lindsay sent her note to NAMECHEAP.com, the registrar of the fake site, but they've not yet responded
- Shopify, the company that hosts our site, said they cannot help because they do not host the fake store
- We should hear soon from our IP attorneys
Any ideas welcomed! -- THANKS
2025-09-08 ... BE LIKE MIKE (Not the shoe-tycoon-basketball player)
Yesterday we learned that Mike Hillebrand, our Friend and vital business Partner and Counselor, passed away a few days ago, on his 78th birthday.
Mike in his All-Around Jacket in Lynx Pattern in 2021.
We needed Mike's Jacquard Loom technology to weave Lynx Pattern. And until we began working on Lynx Pattern, I was not getting the performance I required. Without Lynx Pattern, WeatherWool would not exist.
Mike is (not ready for past-tense) the Founder and main mover behind Material Technology and Logistics, the company that has been (and still is) weaving our MidWeight and FullWeight Jacquard Fabrics since 2012. It was Mike's Jacquard looms, the design team at MTL, and WeatherWool Advisor Rob Stuart (from Woolrich when Woolrich was an American company) that created the Fabric that finally had the performance I sought.
Mike had been fighting a very bad disease for a year. I have seen Mike since his diagnosis, and corresponded with him about four weeks ago. He seemed his usual self to me, but the people at MTL knew he was facing down the reaper.
Everyone in business, everyone in life, would do well to follow Mike's example. About as pleasant a gent as you could ever meet, and always looking to do right by those in his orbit.
It always impressed me that when I would show up at MTL to pick up or drop off some greige Fabric or some yarn to be woven, Mike would have told the guys on the loading dock to let him know when I arrived, and he'd come out and drive the forklift or even help us jackass the freight. MTL has more than one bay, and typically there would be an 18-wheeler with a serious load right next to my little trailer. But ... that's Mike. The personal touch and the utmost concern for doing the job right.
The last thing Mike wrote to me was completely in character:
MTL is prepared to support You as needed anytime.
Best … Always.
With Kindest Regards, Mike
In word and in deed. Hail and Farewell, Mike. And THANK YOU
2025-09-07 ... Strange Links ... Cargo Shorts and "Expensive" ... Rigid Thinking
Four people called me in the last few days to report strange links. One caller said his web-search showed us with the best pricing on Garmin GPS. Another asked about perimeter fencing. A third guy said our pricing in transmission jacks was too good to be true. And one guy called to tell me his search showed that we are sold at Costco.
Also in the last two days, people have asked me why our (100% Wool Denim!) Cargo Shorts are nearly as expensive as our Denim Jeans. The thinking is that the Jeans have more Fabric, so the Shorts should be cheaper. Tailoring is our largest cost, and the Shorts, because of the Cargo Pockets, are more expensive to make than the Jeans. I actually anticipated this question when I priced the Shorts, and, like just about everything we make, the Shorts are underpriced by industry standards. But I also understand that people will think WOW ... $495 is still a lot of cash for a pair of Shorts. I don't disagree.
A rule of thumb regarding input of any kind is that if you hear from four people, as in the case of the weird links, you can bet at least forty people have seen the same thing. And with the question about the price of the Cargo Shorts, I'm sure a flock of people wondered but did not ask me about it. Because our price is the only thing we are ever flamed about, quite a while ago, I created an "Expensive" page that gives some info on our costs. Today, I updated the Expensive page and the Cargo Shorts page.
I think I wrote recently that an old friend, way back during school days, told me my thinking is too rigid. Sometimes Alex points this out too. And then I wonder WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT??!!! ... I'm not the only one who misses the obvious. Here is a great, short, funny, video clip of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, telling how he'd overlooked the astoundingly obvious. For the record, I did NOT overlook what Bezos did.
2025-09-05 ... The Swamp (Event)
Many people have the idea that New Jersey is all smokestack industry, parking lots and roads. It's true that Jersey is the most densely populated State in the USA, but even so, there is a lot of agriculture and green space here. WeatherWool is headquartered about 10 miles (16 km) West of Times Square, and the Midtown Manhattan Garment District is a 30-minute drive on Saturday morning. Also 10 miles from our HQ/home is what we call The Swamp. Our little 25 acres is part of the Hatfield Swamp, which is around 3000 acres (1200 hectares).
It's certainly true that 3000 acres is not a lot of space compared to what's available in other parts of the USA, or even other parts of Jersey. But The Swamp is close, and we can do a lot of different things there, not least of which is test and photograph our clothing. I don't usually go there in summer because poison ivy and mosquitoes rule.
We're cleaning up our basement now, for use as a WeatherWool storage space, and I wanted to dispose of a bunch of brickbats that have probably been in the basement for 100 years. I needed a little time outdoors, away from the keyboard, so, I decided to add my brickbats to a pile of brickbats and cinderblock that has been at The Swamp since before we bought it. This little pile of rubble is so overgrown with vines that it's literally invisible in summer, but I know exactly where it is.
You can't be sure of the mosquito situation until you arrive. Because it's been dry lately, there were no mosquitoes, which is very unusual for summer. (Advisor David Alexander, who is a Hatfield Swamp Professional, tells me the skeeters will be back bigtime in 10 days or so because it's raining now.)
We've owned The Swamp since 1998, and because our property is only 25 acres (10 hectares), I (sort of!) know it really well. But the vigor of the plant life is astounding, and the constant growth changes the look of the place quickly. The older I get the more I appreciate vigor in people and animals and even plants.
Another reason I wanted to visit The Swamp was my recent decision to showcase it a little with some video and stills next month. We're going to get some of the locals together, and see if we can put some game and fish on the grill. During the week of October 18-25 (Saturday to Saturday), bow (deer) season will be open, along with early duck, squirrel and fishing. If you'd like to join us, please LMK.
Yesterday, during a very short visit, I saw deer, painted turtle basking in the sun (why are they sooooo cautious?), great blue herons, squirrels (great game animals), anhinga, teal, fish rising in the pond, and a kingfisher. Anhinga and kingfisher are not there much at all, so it was nice to see them. The rest of the critters are seen just about every visit.
2025-09-04 ... Cargo Shorts Available
Cargo Shorts in Charcoal are available on the website, in-stock and shipping now. We'll tighten up the page and get some more and better photos online by the end of September. Thank You.
2025-09-03 ... AI ... Single Word? ... August Perception and Statistics ... Athleisure
I saw a story on ATHLEISURE clothing this morn, and I wondered if we might fall into the Athleisure Class, at least a little bit. So I asked Pinterest to show me ATHLEISURE. We are definitely NOT Athleisure, with the possible exception of our new Cargo Shorts, which I still need to get listed here. Pinterest displayed mostly sweat pants dressed up a little. The tight, stretchy stuff was almost all synthetic, although some was highly-processed natural fiber. My Mom would have said almost everything pictured was NOT suitable for wearing in public. As a guy, I would have mentally disagreed with Mom in the case of Yoga Pants on certain women. But POINT TAKEN. We don't make anything that Mom would have vetoed for a public appearance, although I'm not sure she ever saw Lynx Pattern Pants.
AI is THE BIG TOPIC everywhere these days. I run various questions past the AI engines regularly. In my usage, AI is mainly a super-fast way of doing web-searches, an easy way of combining multiple searches, and maybe adding some analyses. And of course there are zillions of more sophisticated uses with which I have no familiarity. So I asked a few AI engines:
is there a single word to describe the type of clothing made by WeatherWool?
All the engines searched this website for the answer. I guess that's what they should do, but I was expecting them to go elsewhere, or to review our products and come up with their own words. Grok.com said VERSATILE and the others said OUTERWEAR. One of the engines said Hardcore Luxury is "oxymoronic", which is interesting. I agree Hardcore performance is seldom found in Luxury products, but I don't think it's oxymoronic at all ... more like "rare and desirable" ... such as Rolex or Bentley.
PERCEPTION is something that comes up here regularly. And in the clothing biz, perception is the bottom line. You can't tell someone he's not cold if he feels cold. But I decided to test AI on perception. New Jersey has had the most splendid August weather in my memory, and I was born in 1954. Given that weather is so important to us, and because I like weather a lot anyway (I've been known to give it a capital W!), I've been reveling in this August, and I've asked a lot of people about it. Everyone agrees this August has been THE BEST. Warm but not uncomfortable, with nice breezes and low humidity. The humidity, more than the temperature, is what causes discomfort in our August. We usually call it MUGGY. Mostly, people have said we could not have had nicer weather.
I asked the AI engines:
Was August 2025 the best August weather ever for New Jersey?
I know this is a sort of loaded question because there are so many ways to decide BEST. But also, that's part of AI ... in general, I'd think people would interpret BEST WEATHER as the most comfortable, most pleasant weather for spending time outdoors.
Grok.com said this August was the hottest Jersey August on record since 1895. That would seem to be an objective measure and automatically eliminate this August from consideration as BEST. But Grok's HOTTEST claim was at odds with literally everyone with whom I spoke. Google's AI said that Jersey's August temps were cooler-than-average. I defo agree with Google on this. But WOW, the temp data for last month shouldn't be in dispute. Neither engine addressed humidity, which seemed a big oversight.
2025-09-02 ... THE FIRSTEST WITH THE MOSTEST ... Denim Blankets ... The Runner ... Outdated Updates
A few days ago, a customer tipped me that our Production Status page was very outdated. THANK YOU!! I'd lost track of this page, which is linked from INFO on our MAIN MENU, and should be updated monthly at least, and probably weekly. It's current now. I really appreciate anyone letting me know about stale pages, bad links, typos ... anything. We're always looking to improve our products, and we appreciate all suggestions and criticisms. Our website is not much different from a product. It is the initial representation of what we do...our primary First Impression. Each day, the website hosts about 200 visitors for every order placed. Far more people see the website than ever see our products! I'm told people judge companies based on websites, and decide within a few seconds whether to leave a site or investigate beyond the landing page.
Decades ago, someone told me YOU GOT TO BE THE FIRSTEST WITH THE MOSTEST. In the case of 100% Wool Denim, we were not THE FIRST ... that was probably centuries ago. However, it seems we are among the first people currently doing Wool Denim, and we are definitely doing THE MOSTEST. It's a kick for me to see the wool trade organizations waking up to Wool Denim. I don't know if we had any influence at all, but it is their job to see what wool folks are doing and give us ideas. The International Wool Trade Organization tipped me to Wool Denim via one of their Instagram posts. Like virtually everyone else, I had thought Denim was a cotton fabric.
So... THANKS to IWTO for the idea, but based on a lot of web searches, we are definitely THE FIRSTEST WITH THE MOSTEST now. I've been seeing posts from the wool trade organizations about the importance of Wool Denim. The great Woolmark is using the line "Wool Futures: the Future of Denim". I have to wonder if they got this from us, as I've been writing Wool is the Future of Denim ... and ... Denim is the Future of Wool for a while now. But, IMNSHO, they still don't really get it ... Woolmark keeps highlighting Denim weaves with a little wool mixed in. You can improve polyester by adding some wool, but you can't improve wool by adding polyester (or anything else) ... so sayeth a total wool bigot.
It's crazy but true that WeatherWool is the World Leader in 100% Wool Denim.
And now I'm thinking MORE MOSTEST. We're going to make some Medium Blankets in Charcoal Denim. Whether we make Crib Blankets in the Charcoal is up to Debby, who is definitely The Big Boss around here regarding All Things Baby. AND ... I think it's time to revive development of the Runner, a wool shirt for running, jogging, speed walking, and hard hiking. We've got plenty of Denim Charcoal Fabric to work with, and it seems to me our Denim will suit this application. We shall find out ... soon! (And circling back to stale and bad links, I let the idea of the Runner slip five years ago when so much went completely shingotz in the entire world. So some of the material is outdated and some of the links may fail. I only decided to revive the Runner five minutes before writing this Blog.)
2025-08-30 ... Are We Different?
This morning, I delivered Fabric to make Blazers (not yet on website) and I picked up finished Cargo Shorts (also not yet on website). Blazers and Short Pants -- in (our 100% Wool) Denim! -- are not where I would have ever envisioned this company going in 2010 or 2015 or even in 2020.
Our devotion to Hardcore Luxury products (Hardcore performance from Luxurious Fabrics) has not changed and will not change. And 100% American will not change.
But what has changed is my understanding and my misunderstanding of the American Wool World, the overall culture, the realities of accounting and of this business, and my own goals for WeatherWool.
At the start of WeatherWool I was not concerned that the American Wool World is only a small fraction of what it was. But that is a primary focus now, and I am hoping we can help American Wool continue to reverse the slide. We need our Partners to thrive, and at present, there is serious difficulty.
Until lately I was not thinking about how changes in attitudes toward clothing would affect us, let alone how important it is for us to work to change those attitudes. We need people to THINK WOOL for reasons of performance, comfort, versatility, health, environmental impact, preservation of family ranching ... even convenience. People should think of wool for these reasons, but don't ... yet.
I've been saying lately that 100% Wool Denim is the future of Wool ... and ... Wool is the future of Denim. The world is saturated with Denim, but it's all cotton. People -- a great many people -- are looking for a new denim-angle and wool provides it, in a bunch of ways. Denim can sell a lot of wool.
For us, 100% Wool Denim does four things, at least:
- It brings people to us because when the Denim-Crowd searches for some new twist, they find us and are intrigued and then very pleased when they try it
- Denim gives us additional entries to the markets for casual wear, workwear and even semi-dress wear. Also city, warm-weather and travel. Our Denim pieces check a lot of boxes
- Our production timetable is waaaay long, even with Denim. But Denim saves a lot of time, compared to our Jacquard Fabrics. Batches 10 and Innes-1 (Batch 11) were purchased in the Spring of 2024. All of the Batch 10 Denim Fabric is complete, and we've been shipping garments for months. It was not until yesterday that I picked up the first little bit of Innes-1 Jacquard Fabric in MidWeight Lynx (still on schedule to ship Anoraks in October), and we won't complete making the Innes-1 Jacquard Fabrics for probably another six months, although, hopefully, getting our own looms online will help that situation. Essentially, the Denim lets us go a lot faster
- (The accounting confuses me, but this is my understanding.) Denim also helps us with taxes. As far as the government is concerned, we do not have any production-related expenses until we have a sale. So, for the 18-30 months we need to produce and sell Jacquard garments, the government says we are not spending money, but instead are retaining profits, which means paying taxes. The quicker (less slow!) we can go from purchase of greasy wool to sales of finished garments, the less ugly the tax situation becomes. (This is a general business thing, not just us. Many prices could come down a bunch if businesses could deduct expenses when incurred.) As I understand it, things eventually net out, so long as we actually make sales, but two years is a long time to wait to book an expense.
Our original plans have expanded a lot, but we are more enthusiastic and committed than ever to those original plans and to our expanded plans.
2025-08-29 ... Busy Couple Days!
We did send our Update, as mentioned in the previous entry. The Update, plus other things already scheduled, have kept Sun Dog (entry from 2025-08-13) on the move, and resulted in a lot of activity here.
- THANKS to all who responded to our email Update. We'll get everything taken care of as soon as we can. Tonight begins what will truly be Labor Day weekend!
- Yesterday started with a nice visit from Tyler, a new customer from Brooklyn
- Next, I picked up some more Denim CPOs at Better Team. We have more CPOs in stock than ever before. Almost all of them are in Denim (yeah, 100% Wool!), but we do have a few in our Jacquard-weave Fabric, with more coming before year-end. This week, we decided to separate the Denim CPOs and Jacquard CPOs into two separate products, even though the design is the same. It made some technical aspects of website maintenance easier, plus the Denim CPOs are slightly longer than the Jacquard CPOs, for mysterious reasons (I had thought Debby made a change!)
- Then I picked up at Factory8 a Special-Edition Black Whipcord Shirt with White Buttons and White Button-Ribbon on both sides of the center-front. Debby hates it, but ... she married a guy who used to wear lime-green shoes (100 pounds ago). Big-name designers will soon copy this look. I need to see if Polson Law can make this design WeatherWool Intellectual Property, ala Christian Louboutin (the company with trademarked red-sole high heels). We'll do an unbroken ribbon in actual production
- Gus, a Friend of WeatherWool who is younger than my kids, invited me to his Company Cookout and Birthday Party in the old industrial section of Brooklyn. I love the feel of this part of Brooklyn ... blocks and blocks of old, small, commercial/industrial buildings plus some housing. THANKS GUS, I felt right at home, had a great time and great steak and met some very interesting folks. And I might not have been the oldest in attendance! A couple of the young tech-guys were interested that I'd been at Bell Labs during the early days of Unix. Not that I had anything to do with it, but Unix is legendary in some circles
- A few hours sleep, then on the road to American Woolen Company. Mostly, I picked up Batch Innes-1 Drab Green Whipcord Fabric, but also some experimental 100% Worsted Flannel Fabric, the last of the Batch 10 Denim and the first of the Innes-1 MidWeight Lynx. Innes-1 is a Big Deal to us because it is our first batch of Fabric that is made completely from the fiber grown on a single Ranch ... in this case, the Innes Ranch of Wyoming. As usual, Jacob Long, owner of AWC, loaded me up personally, moving like his tail was on fire
- While I was headed South from Northern Connecticut, Debby and Alex had a long visit with a new customer, David, who gifted us some Amish Lamb Chops. David is in the food business, and the Amish have a reputation for fantastic meats
- From AWC I went directly to Factory8 to drop off enough Whipcord for the Drab Green Whipcord Shirts already offered on this site. Most people would surprised at how beautiful and green are the last 40 or so miles (64 km) of the drive ... the Sawmill Parkway, the Hudson River, the Henry Hudson Parkway all the way into Midtown Manhattan. It was perfect hearing the big 1966 Lovin' Spoonful hit SUMMER IN THE CITY
- JR and a helper unloaded Fabric and then loaded me up with some garments
- I was home before noon. Alex and Steven (we have two people helping us now and I am remiss not putting them on the website, but I haven't quite settled on their WeatherWool names, tho) unloaded the truck while I checked off each roll of Fabric on the Bill of Lading (somebody has to do it!)
- The out-of-office activity has left me about 500 mails behind. I will catch up as soon as I can ...
- ... but first thing tomorrow, I'll be heading back to NYC to pick up our (still not on website) Cargo Shorts, in Batch 10 Charcoal Denim. Once we have them, we'll need to get some info and photos on this site. We'll send a pair to Cody, and he'll just have to suffer my "photography" until he can replace whatever I put online. It's absurd at this point, but only three days ago we concluded Cody is about images and I'm about words.
JR texted me this evening to let me know the Fabric for the Drab Green Whipcord Shirts I dropped off late this morning has already been cut!!
2025-08-27 ... Customer Contacts, Newsletter and Updates
Our customer communications default to my own preferences, for better or worse. Which means the comms that go out to "everyone" have been very few, and for a year or so, we did not send any bulk mails. We sent a newsletter to all email subscribers the first of this month.
When people first get in touch with us via the website, they can opt in for email and/or SMS-text marketing contact.
We don't do SMS-text marketing because I personally really dislike that approach. My own phone had been set to chime when a text arrived. Maybe that's just because of age, I don't know, but I'd associated text messages as a sort of urgent thing, and the chime-announcement seemed like a good idea. But I was getting so many of them, including overnight, that I turned off the chime. Any comms from us are unlikely to be urgent, and I definitely don't want to interrupt people, let alone wake them, with some bit of commercial communication. I know some people would prefer a short text update to an email, and if your phone is also your computer, then probably there isn't even much difference between text and email. But still, I don't know those folks will ever get marketing texts from us. Maybe, as it becomes more possible to customize (same root-word as CUSTOMER!) comms. People who want order updates, such as tracking numbers, via text message will get those, but that's not marketing.
But we plan to send mails once or twice monthly. (And each one will have an UNSUBSCRIBE button at the end.) At first I was thinking we'd do only a Newsletter, about once a month. But I just decided to email a short Update in between the Newsletters. A couple of people wrote me that they prefer very short communications with no photos. So we're going to do a very concise words-only UPDATE shortly. (And I can picture Debby's raised eyebrows over my use of CONCISE.)
In laying out this idea yesterday, I had an interesting exchange with Cody, who does not at all support the text-only Update. Cody is a visual-guy whose orientation is imagery. He feels people will simply skip over an email with no photos. Some people doubtless will do exactly that. But hopefully there won't be a shortage of people who will appreciate a short and very direct note.
Even as we send our Newsletters and Updates, we'll continue to offer that information here, first.
The next Newsletter, coming in a couple of weeks, will have a story (not sure what that will be), the usual product announcements, and a discussion of my idea that Denim is the next big thing for Wool, and that Wool is the next big thing for Denim.
And the next/first Update won't do much more than list and link the products in-stock now, and those products that are in, or going into production.
More than anything else, the Newsletter and Update will remind people of us.
The first Update will offer:
In-Stock and Shipping Now in our 100% Wool Denim:
Chore Coats, Hooded Jackets, CPO Shirts
Shipping Soon (can be ordered now) in our 100% Wool Denim:
HoodOraks, Five-Pocket Vest (not yet on website!), Cargo Shorts (not yet on website)
In-Stock and Shipping Now in our 100% Wool Original Jacquard Fabrics:
FullWeight ShirtJac, All-Around Jackets, Mountain Jackets/SkiJacs, Al’s Anorak in various fabrics/size
Shipping Soon or going into production in our Original Jacquard MidWeight Lynx Pattern Fabric:
Al’s Anorak shipping in October; CPO, Hooded Jacket, HoodOrak expected ship November-December
2025-08-25 ... Guernsey, Channel Islands ... Tariffs ... Tooth Enamel and Wool
For us and our customers, tariffs have been a sore spot this year. I've had a hard time keeping up with the news, partly because the tariff regulations are complex and partly because I have a very low red-tape threshold. But it looks like our Canadian customers, as of 22 August 2025, no longer need to pay an import duty on our products. US and Canadian wool crossed the border in either direction with 0 tariff for many years, but things got hot in 2025. Now it looks like the situation is back to the historical 0 for woolens.
I thought we were headed for 0 tariff with EU and UK ... could have sworn I saw that in the news, but the AI-assisted search engines don't agree. Except one of them cited me, saying 0 is expected when the new deals become law. It's unsettling, but also indicative, when my own stuff pops up in my research.
Speaking of sources, Wiley is a publisher whose mark I respected way back during my school days. My opinion has not changed, but I'm not following Natural Sciences anymore, either. In any case, I came across an encouraging report, published by Wiley, that derivatives of sheep's wool can repair damaged enamel of human teeth. Here are a couple of the meaty paragraphs from Wiley's Open Access release (THANKS to Wiley and the approximately 20 authors!):
Keratin is a protein that has garnered attention for its potential biomedical applications, particularly in regenerative medicine.[11-13] Keratin, particularly α-keratin found in wool, exhibits a complex hierarchical structure that enables its self-assembly and contributes to its mechanical strength and stability. The organic structure of keratin is characterized by its complex hierarchy and dense network of covalent and noncovalent interactions, including its ionic, hydrogen, and disulfide bonds. Covalent disulfide bonds, formed through cystine cross-links between cysteine residues, play a crucial role in stabilizing the polypeptide chains, thereby enhancing the fiber's mechanical integrity. Noncovalent interactions further facilitate keratin self-assembly into highly ordered, mechanically robust structures essential for its biological function and resistance to chemical and enzymaticdegradation.[14, 15] Although some studies have highlighted the structural and functional significance of keratin in tooth enamel,[16, 17] research investigating its biomedical applications in enamel repair and regeneration remains limited.
In this study, water-based, self-crosslinking keratin films able to facilitate dynamic conformational changes and provide templates for hierarchical mineralization were developed. These keratin films are reported to optimize their conformation upon mineralization and control the nucleation and growth of mineralized structures, therefore infiltrating early enamel carious lesions to restore their intrinsic crystallographic structure, cosmetic appearance, and mechanical capabilities. This negates the need for invasive operative intervention and paves the way for a paradigm shift in the clinical management of early carious lesions.
I don't know anything about it, but a 2-second search shows that keratin is the primary component of human hair as well as sheep's wool. And there are many kinds of keratin. How great if Sheep Keratin could heal cavities and repair and regrow enamel!!
We're honored to have customers in many places worldwide. A couple of days ago, we got an order from Guernsey ... maybe our first order from Guernsey. When I was working in financial services, I interacted with quite a few people in Guernsey and Jersey -- the Channel Islands. Although the Islands are British, they are self-governing, and their tax and regulatory regime has made them a favored spot for investment management services. I knew that people had been living on the Channel Islands for a long, long time, and I wasn't aware of whatever else was going on there. So, when the order from Guernsey popped in, I decided to do a minute's research. Financial services are very important to the local economy, but almost all the land seems to be farms. I would have been really surprised by this except that I'd already been surprised, years ago, to find that Great Britain is also almost all green. The Channel Islands don't get hot in summer and they don't get cold in winter. I love seafood and although people usually knock British food, I always thought it was good whenever I was working in London. I think I'd really like the Channel Islands. And not to slight Guernsey, but being from New Jersey, I'd have to visit Jersey first ... !!
2025-08-24 ... Spinning Again
A couple of teaser-facts on Spinning (following up on the entry from early this morning):
- Any kind of fiber can be woolen-spun. For us, it's always 100% wool fiber, but cotton and synthetic and blends of any kind can also be woolen-spun
- Worsted spinning was invented in Worsted, England
2025-08-24 ... Spinning
Spinning yarn is a hugely important part of what we do. There are a great many types of spinning, many ways to use the yarn and various ways to prepare the wool for spinning. And then AFTER the spinning there are various ways to prepare the yarn for weaving.
Because we are now making several types of Fabric, and in particular because of our Denim, I find myself on the phone with customers talking about different ways to spin yarn and different ways to weave yarn. I have just updated our page on Spinning.
2025-08-22 ... Intellectual Property
I just updated our Intellectual Property page. Trademarks, copyright, etc. That stuff is really important to us, and we are accumulating more of it as time goes by.
2025-08-21 ... Mountain Meadow Wool (Wyoming)
Debby and I visited Ben Hostetler and the team at Mountain Meadow Wool a few years ago. Mountain Meadow operates out of Buffalo, Wyoming, about 100 miles (160 km) North of Casper, where our son Zack lives with his family. We spent some time with Ben a few years ago (THANKS, BEN!!) and we need to get back.
This morning I received Mountain Meadow's latest newsletter, and they have surely been busy! From what I remember (never a sure bet!), they've added new equipment, new services and an updated website.
One thing I really like is that Ben works with local Wool Growers, turning their raw wool into finished products. Ben focuses mostly on knitting, offering yarns as well as finished products.
We appreciated the time Ben spent with us, and we have stayed in touch, a little, ever since.
Companies like Mountain Meadow (I don't know, actually, if there ARE any companies like Mountain Meadow) are helping wool, American Wool in particular, survive and THRIVE (I hope!).
2025-08-20 ... Jeans Shipping ... CPOs Shipping ... Getting Noticed? ... Chiming In
Recently, the Aussies (Woolmark) posted on Instagram about Denim that has SOME wool in it, and since then several people have picked up on that post. It seems the world is awakening to Wool Denim. I'm glad about that, and (I think?) I'm also glad that we seem to still be the only ones taking Wool Denim seriously (as in 100% Wool Denim). But this tiny flurry of publicity has posed a bit of dilemma for me. The first such post I saw, linked above, was from Woolmark, the trade group of the Australian Wool Growers. I always wonder if I should comment on posts from other wool folks, because we are to some degree competitors. And Woolmark could quite reasonably object to having their account used to intro any company that does not use Aussie wool. On the other hand, if the idea is to promote wool, then maybe they'd want to hear from me. So, two weeks ago, I commented:
YIPPEE and THANK YOU for highlighting Wool Denim!! We've been making 100% Wool Denim for two years and our customers love it. The addition of wool improves the other fibers, but not vice versa ... at least in our totally wool-centric opinion. WOOLMARK IS GREAT. THANKS for what you do!! -- Ralph
Two days ago, Woolmark posted about Denim again ... The evolution of denim and what's coming next ...
Princess Di, almost for sure, was wearing cotton denim, but at least a big player like Woolmark is getting the idea!!
... so I chimed in again:
It's funny that people (including me until 2023) do not know that DENIM IS A WEAVE and can be woven from yarns of many different compositions. We began testing our 100% Wool Denim in 2023, and have loved it ever since. We've been shipping it to customers since April of 2024, and it has made a lot of "wool converts". Wool Denim -- 100% Wool Denim, if you ask me! -- is going to capture the hearts of a lot of people who have never worn and never even considered wool. We are seeing it every day! .... Keep doing what you do, Woolmark! You have helped us a lot!! -- Thank You -- Ralph
And I sent a Direct (meaning PRIVATE) message:
Hi Woolmark! -- I just commented on your DENIM post from two days ago. Given that we are a 100% USA company, maybe you don't want me on your account. If so, please clobber the comment and let me know to back off. It would be understandable, and no hard feelings. WeatherWool is very grateful for your work and we have gotten a lot of great info from Woolmark. And we completely agree that Denim is going to be a big deal for us in Wool World. THANKS and ALL THE BEST -- Ralph
We'll see if Woolmark responds at all. My comment from two weeks ago is still online, Woolmark didn't give it a LIKE, but they didn't clobber it, either.
I feel that the wool market has been beaten so far down that all us wool-people are in the same lifeboat. But, it's well-known that people in a lifeboat sometimes throw each other overboard. In a similar vein, a bigtime Wall Street guy I used to work with once told me "The world is built on conflict of interest."
Long ago, I decided that we'd not shy away from mentioning other players in the wool world here, and that we'd even feature all the people and companies (our Partners) that make our work possible. I've been told I'm making it too easy for other people to compete with us, to copy what we do, to detract from the attention our Partners might devote to us. But I don't want to rely on secrets. I want to compete on quality and service. If we help some other folks along the way, that will help us improve, too.
Our 100% Wool Denim Jeans in Charcoal and in Walnut are shipping now! And, yeah, we are the only people in the world, near as I can tell, that have such.
We're also shipping some of the newest CPOs in Denim. Nobody else offering anything like that, either.
Evidently, we are getting noticed more by people in the manufacturing-support space. I'm being contacted by numerous companies that offer software that helps manage production, inventory, billing, etc. And I probably should start working with one of these outfits. I'll be investigating possibilities.
2025-08-19 ... Toxic Chemical Code Words, Courtesy @HanningDunning11
More and more people -- such as me -- are waking up to the potential harm the wrong textiles can cause. Given that we spend virtually our entire lives wrapped in textiles, and given that our skin can absorb many different chemicals and even small bits of plastic, what we wear is a big deal. As far as I know, WeatherWool is in good shape. And wool is a great foundation. But I want to know more about our own goods as well as the overall situation.
It's interesting to reflect that, at least in the USA, there is no legal requirement to disclose the chemicals that have been used in processing clothing. So although we are required to include labels showing place of manufacture, composition of Fabric and care instructions, we don't have to include information about our "ingredients" in the way food labeling must. I believe that's because we (this is the GIANT COLLECTIVE WE!) have not much paid attention ... we think of clothing as something that sits on our skin but not as something that truly interacts with us, even though it does! I also believe our perspective is changing very fast.
I've recently begun following Hannah Dunning's Instagram account. A post from 12 August about Chemical "Code Words" caught my attention. And for me, it's another one of those situations where, once pointed out, it's going to stay in my mind. BIG THANKS to Hannah (Ms Dunning?! ... but she seems very friendly) for this post and the info offered. If Hannah cited anyone else I did not see. Hannah presents herself not as an authority, but instead as someone trying to find out the story and offering up what info she believes worthy. The Chemical Code Words that raise Hannah's red flags:
- Water Proof, Water Resistant, Sweat Resistant likely means a coating with something in the PFAS chemical family. You can find a ton of nasty info on PFAS
- Odor-Resistance likely means antimicrobial chemicals which can harm the wearer and harm the many types of beneficial bacteria that live on our skin (this was news to me!)
- Wrinkle Proof often means treatment with formaldehyde (a primary embalming fluid), which is quite harmful on our skin, lungs, eyes. It can irritate our nasal passages enough to cause nosebleeds! I first heard about the nosebleeds from "P", who did an intense, thorough and very entertaining review of his WarriorWool Anorak, and told a nosebleed (literally) story about what led him to search us out!
- UV Protection can mean the textile is coated with very tiny bits that can be inhaled or absorbed and disrupt normal body functions. NB: Wool, on its own, offers significant UV protection because that's how Nature made it
- Fire Resistance treatments may use chemicals that can cause problems. Most streetwear is not treated, although some is. Some workwear is specifically treated to pass "FR" testing, and the needed chemicals can be bad news. Wool is naturally non-flammable, meaning it will not burn under normal conditions. We have occasionally considered FR testing, but it would cost a few thousand dollars annually for each of our Fabrics. And given that wool is well-known as naturally FR, we have not paid for the commercial testing
- Stain Resistant is PFAS again
- Easy Care for non-wool clothing usually means wrinkle-free, which brings up formaldehyde again. Wool naturally resists wrinkling. But Easy-Care for woolens can mean shrink-resistance, which in turn likely involves superwashing with acid, and then applying a plastic polymer coating on the wool fibers. Superwashing is a wool-industry standard, but we stopped superwashing with Batch 8.
We have had some testing done, and I don't know of any nasties in our goods. But I also don't know enough about the testing or the potential nasties to coast on this situation.
2025-08-18 ... Yesterday, Slight Correction and Additional Info
I slightly corrected a little of the info from yesterday. The American Chestnut Foundation is no longer supporting the restoration efforts at SUNY/ESF, at least partly because the groups are different techniques. AND ... for central New-York-minded folks, the local chapter of TACF is now independent.
More importantly, Dr Newhouse's effort is ESF's American Chestnut Research & Restoration Project. The work is privately funded, so donations are vital.
2025-08-17 ... SUNY, SU, ESF, ACF, Trucks and Chestnuts, Black Squirrels and Pennsylvania Tuxedos
[All this actually is wool-related …]
Waaaaay back in 1970, I planned to go to Rutgers U in September of 1971. Based on my academics, I thought I’d get into Rutgers pretty easily. But Rutgers, I think, figured out that I had no discipline and no real motivation. College had always just been what my folks felt was in my future. What little effort I put into high school pretty well evaporated by senior year of high school, which, I thought, was not relevant to college admissions. WRONG. Rutgers asked for my first-semester senior-year transcripts, which were easily the worst of my life. And I was rejected by Rutgers. However, I’d been advised to apply to a couple of “ditch schools” … schools you did not really want to attend, but schools that would accept you just in case. And my ditch school did accept me. However – this is such a joke! – I had read a magazine article written by a guy who’d gotten his PhD in BOBCATS at Syracuse University. I wanted to study Biology, so I applied to SU on the basis of that magazine article. Wish I remember who the author was!
Syracuse really wanted me to go, and, so … that’s where I went to school. Only after starting school there did I learn that, based on bobcats, I should have applied to the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science at Forestry (ESF) at Syracuse University (SU). SUNY/ESF students, known on campus as STUMPIES, take liberal arts courses and some of the science/math at SU, and ESF offers only the courses that are focused on ESF. I had actually applied to the wrong school, but it’s also quite possible that I would not have been accepted at SUNY/ESF, particularly as an out-of-state student. Anyhow, off to SU I went, where I met Debby. I could not have had a more marvelous result. And I still have a bunch of close friends from my years at SU.
Starting school, I knew that winter in Syracuse, about 100 miles/160 km South of the Canadian border, would be tougher than the winters in the NYC area. I also knew that the gray squirrels that are so widespread in the Eastern USA will sometimes be completely black in the Northern parts of their range. I was startled to see BLACK Gray Squirrels when I arrived on campus. Winter was indeed significantly more severe but my Woolrich red-and-black plaid (wool) hunting jacket handled the weather very well. Although I did not study anything related to wool or clothing manufacture, that old “Pennsylvania Tuxedo” jacket reinforced my respect for wool.
In the early 1970s, synthetics were just getting popular, and a friend of mine had a green synthetic jacket. It was usual in those days for guys to have only one jacket, and one winter for a couple of weeks I switched jackets with a friend who had a light synthetic. He liked my wool jacket!
But SU days ended in 1975!! ... yeah, 50 years ago. I tried to get Debby and my friends to attend the 50-year reunion on campus this past April, but nobody else wanted to go!! I still don’t understand that. However … fate intervened and I did get my way, a little bit …
Overall, SUNY has 64 campuses and about 375,000 students. A lot of variety. Almost a year ago, we placed an ad on the job board of SUNY’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), which is located at the edge of the NYC Garment District. Since November, a wonderful young woman, Ashley (WeatherWool name is PATCHES) has been working with us, and she’s been great. Ashley’s major was Textile Design, and she was awarded an Associate Degree from FIT in May (YAY Patches!!). It turns out that SUNY/ESF also offers Textile Design, and this week Ashley will begin working toward her Bachelor of Science in Textile Design!! WeatherWool is all about Textile Design, and we love the idea that, possibly, working here will have been a boost to Ashley. We'll keep working together, somehow, while she studies at ESF.
Chestnuts are another factor in this mix. They’ve been so long gone that most people have never heard of the fabulous American Chestnut Tree. It so happens I grew up in a house with American Chestnut woodwork, so I’d heard of it. The American Chestnut has reasonably been called A Perfect Tree (Susan Frienkel wrote the book). The American Chestnut produced huge amounts of fabulous, edible chestnuts, great lumber and the most beautiful blossoms you’ll ever see. The Chestnut was as much as half the Eastern Forest from Georgia to Maine and West to Ohio. But an invasive blight laid them low … billions of them gone in just a decade or so, about 100 years ago. They are not quite GONE ... the blight does not kill the roots … so the trees keep sending up new growth, which the blight knocks back before the trees reach reproductive age/size.
Our chestnuts may be (almost completely) gone, but they are far from forgotten. For many years, I’ve been aware of The American Chestnut Foundation, and how they have been helping to support efforts to breed blight-resistant American Chestnuts. It so happens that separate restoration work is led by Dr Andy Newhouse of SUNY/ESF. I’ve been wanting to get in touch with Dr Newhouse for a while. I love what he is doing, and I knew he’d make a great interview for a WeatherWool video. So, when I heard Patches was headed for Syracuse, I could not resist putting together a road trip … Dr Newhouse agreed to meet and offered a tour of the research facility, and Ashley and her Mom were good with the idea of using our pickup to get moved in on campus. And Debby loved the idea of getting Ashley off to school.
They say when you return to your old haunts, everything seems smaller. That was not at all the case. Campus seemed as big as ever, but prettier! What did get smaller/shorter was the ride! Way back when, neither the roads nor the cars were as good as now, and so the drive was accomplished much quicker. It’s like Syracuse got a lot closer!
The old truck handled things great until we got Ashley moved in, but the starter quit in the parking lot of the hotel where Debby and I were staying. If it had to die, that was a good place for it to happen. Problem was, on Friday, nobody in the area could get it fixed until late Monday afternoon, and we couldn’t stay past our original Saturday morning departure. AAA did a great job of arranging for and covering half the cost of a flatbed wrecker that carried my truck all the way back to our usual maintenance shop in New Jersey, a distance of 232 miles/373 km. The old truck is showing its age, and I was thinking maybe it was getting to the end. But the tow truck driver VERY strongly advised us to drive it for as long as we could keep it going. He is of the opinion that since about 2020, the reliability of trucks has really nosedived. He said it’s not at all unusual for him to pick up new trucks with very low mileage. Good thing I have a weakness for old trucks!
A couple of weeks prior to our trip, I'd sent a Chore Coat to Dr Newhouse, and while we waited for the wrecker to pick us up, I explained to Andy why I couldn't make our meeting, and so instead we had a pretty long phone talk. I will save that info for the video (in the next few months, I hope!), but will say now that the restoration effort is tantalizingly close to going LIVE, INTO THE FORESTS!
2025-08-14 ... ROAD TRIP! ... Fine, Funny Ending (for old chairs)
Debby and I will be on the road until Saturday Night!! Back in the office on Sunday the 17th.
We've been cleaning out and sprucing up our basement because we need the storage space. We're heading into the "wool-months" with more inventory than ever before, and our usual storage spaces are completely filled, with lots more inventory in the works. So, our basement, which has been something of a dungeon since we moved here in 1984, is being semi-finished. And of course, having been here so long, the basement has filled up with all kinds of stuff. Now that we need the space, we are trying to get rid of a lot of whatever has been down there for years and decades and, probably even a century!
There were four heavy, wrought-iron chairs that I brought up from the basement and placed on the front porch. I knew better than to set them out on the curb (where someone driving by would scoop them up) before getting the final nod from The Big Boss of the Household. Debby reluctantly agreed they could go, but then decided instead we could use them on the living room porch. (The house is a turn-of-the-previous-century Colonial-Revival, and the Freemans, who built our place, evidently loved porches.) We'd just lately gotten rid of the stuff that had been on the living room porch, and so Debby decided to fill that vacuum with these chairs that came oh-so-close to a new life among strangers. Immediately after Debby issued the Living Room Porch Decree, a wonderful local customer, Bill H, stopped by. Bill took one look at the old chairs and announced they needed to be re-upholstered with (WeatherWool 100% Wool -- sorry!) Denim! Brilliant! THANKS, BILL! Even I liked that idea, and we did need a couple of chairs for the Showroom (formerly the living room).
Debby very expertly re-upholstered these heavy iron chairs in our Moss Green Denim, and they have a new life and are very reasonably part of the Showroom, showing the Denim. On one chair is the time-clock faceplate (Blog of 2025-07-19) which had likely been in the basement over 100 years. On the other chair is a WeatherWool Pillow that will likely be offered on this website because The Big Boss of the House and of WeatherWool IS A GURL. (And she is NOT going to like this photo, but it will do for now.)
2025-08-13 ... Wool Performance with Water ... (and SLO-MO) ... Sun Dog
Wool is one of my favorite things, for a bunch or reasons. But if it wasn't for the way wool performs as clothing, I wouldn't have done WeatherWool at all.
One of my other favorite things is learning new stuff, particularly if the new info is surprising, or, even better, confounding. A few days ago, I came across a video of a SLINKY (the "toy"!) falling. This is definitely confounding for me! For those who don't want to visit YouTube ... if you hold a Slinky vertically, and let go, the bottom of the Slinky does not fall until the top of the Slinky falls down to the bottom!
I bring up the Slinky here because the behavior of wool confounds so many people. The folks who offer alpaca products say that alpaca does not absorb water, and seem to believe that to be an advantage alpaca has over wool. And sometimes that might be an advantage. From my perspective, though, the fact that wool does adsorb water is a great feature, and not a drawback. But wool's behavior in the presence of liquid water and water vapor is confounding to a lot of people ... to the point they refuse to believe it.
We've released videos on our YouTube Channel and on this website about how wool can save your life if you get dumped in a winter river. And there is written info about what the scientists say is happening. But we are about clothing, and so what really counts is the SUBJECTIVE experience, and if a science-mind claims the subjective experience is wrong, I think it's the science-mind that is wrong.
People have absolutely insisted wool simply cannot generate heat (comments on the linked video). When people contradict and ridicule our info publicly, I feel I must respond. I'm OK with being personally ridiculed, but don't ridicule my wool! Plus I need to make sure the written record is as correct as I can make it. So, I did yet another round of defense today, responding to a comment I'd just seen, even though it was a few months old ... reproduced here to illustrate the story, but also to illustrate an attitude I fear is my own, sometimes:
@mastpg: Wool is warm, but claims of a "chemical reaction" generating heat when wool is wetted is nonsense. Don't know why an actual company would make bogus claims like this. It's complete nonsense.
WeatherWool
@WeatherWool: Hi, We could delete this, but we stand by it. By all means, prove us wrong. We're here to learn together. Not trying to sell bogus claims. No one here at WeatherWool is claiming to be an expert. We're all just trying to better understand and constantly improve our product. - Cody
@mastpg The release of water vapor's latent heat when it condenses to liquid or forms polar hydrogen bonds with one of the three amino acids making up keratin (~90% of wool by weight) happens only with water vapor. When liquid water swaps intra-water hydrogen bonds, all of which are O-H...H, for hydrogen bonds with the guanidinium group in arginine, the carboxylic acid group in alanine or the S-H, N-H, C-H or carboxylic acid groups on cystine...leucine can't form hydrogen bonds...that process actually requires energy, as all those structures are less polar than O-H. Thus, all the hydrogen bonding between liquid water and polar sites within the wool fiber is endothermic. It REQUIRES energy. It does not release it.
Please just stop and retract this video. It is completely absurd in both tone and content. If you take it down, I'll do the complete calculation for the maximum theoretical amount of latent heat released by water vapor forming hydrogen bonds with the carboxylic acid and guanidinium groups, S-H, N-H and C-H sites and try to find out how quickly this happens at varying humidity and temperature levels.
@WeatherWool: Hello, anonymous theoretical authority. This is Ralph, founder of WeatherWool and never anonymous. ......... Similar comments have been made previously on our wool/water/heat videos, and I respond when I see these comments (just saw this exchange between you and Cody) because I think it's necessary.
If I didn't believe what we post, we would not post. And our post is supported by our actual experiences.
Stop with the THEORETICAL!! ..... What makes you so sure you understand what is possible, or what Nature actually does? Startling! And so so so authoritative!!! What an attitude?!! "If you do as I say, I'll treat you to some more of my THEORETICAL CALCULATIONS!!" .... "Nature can behave only in the ways I imagine it can behave." How Humpty Dumpty of you!!
Tell you what ... Keep your THEORETICAL and try an actual observation. A very simple experiment. Take some dry wool. Stick a thermometer in it. Put it in a humid room, keep an eye on the thermometer. This is not new stuff. Here is a link to some research from Australia's CSIRO (national science agency): https://www.woolwise.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/03.2-The-Wool-Fibre-and-its-applications-Notes.pdf ... take a look at page 6.
If you want a more relevant experiment, get a serious wool jacket and take it outdoors when it is near-freezing and humid.
We're concerned with real-world, subjective experience. That's why we've jumped in freezing rivers. We love the science and the theory and the experiments because we want to understand. But all the books and theories are rubbish compared to actual people doing actual things in actual Natural conditions and reporting their actual experiences.
And sorry if this was tedious but the way wool behaves with respect to water is so integral to what we are doing ... and if you don't believe it, test it! It's very simple. We've occasionally bandied the idea of offering a test kit to help people see for themselves. We rejected the idea as being too far afield from what we do. But ...
As an aside ... there are a bunch of SLINKY FALLING videos on YouTube. A nice one is done by two young guys, THE SLO-MO GUYS, who have 15 million people subscribing to their YouTube Channel! This is a wonderful, shocking sort of info for me!
We love that so many of our customers use our wool for photography. Decades ago, before we had slo-mo video, we had Harold Edgerton, whose high-speed photography surprised and sometimes confounded my expectations of physical behaviors. You can find lots of Edgerton's work on the web. I just had a really nice talk with Richard Mills (the SUN DOG!) earlier today. Richard doesn't do slo-mo, as far as I know, but WeatherWool was with him when he snapped this tremendous Sun Dog in Yellowstone National Park when the temp was -31F/-35C.
A couple of years ago, I was telling people to call me SUN DOG, but nobody did.
2025-08-12 ... Garden State Sheep Show ... YouTube Channel
My little old New Jersey, "The Garden State", does not have any large wool producers, but there are lots of small flocks here, with fine animals growing some gorgeous wool. Every year in September, the Garden State Sheep Breeders holds their Sheep and Fiber Festival at the Hunterdon County Fairgrounds in Ringoes. This year, September 13 and 14, Saturday and Sunday. I love seeing the youngsters showing their animals, the fleece competitions, and the dogs herding the flocks.
In June I was happy to see that our tiny YouTube Channel -- 3500 subscribers -- had slightly more minutes watched than minutes in the month (44,300). But we had a big jump in July, up to 162,800 minutes. Given that July is the worst month for wool sales, this seems a really good sign.
I don't know my way around YouTube very well, even as a user, let alone a publisher/creator. But YouTube makes some interesting stats easy to find. What is not so easy is figuring out what people will watch, and why.
- We have published about 50 videos
- Our most-watched and most-liked video, by a wide margin, is "Brook Trout & Sinking Lines with Jim Abbott". Jim has become a friend (thanks to WeatherWool) and the video was done by Cody. This video is all about fishing and nothing about wool, except that Jim is wearing his Anorak. Jim has a fantastic voice and bearing and it's easy to see he is the genuine article
- Our second most-watched video is Cody's 10-minute presentation of the South Shore Chore Coat, from August of last year. This is all about the wool, and nothing else. Sort of the opposite of the Brook Trout video. Looks like we need to do more product videos ...
- Our oldest video is from April of 2015. I did not realize it's been that long. Thanks to Advisor Darrell Holland for this review
- The video that generated the most comments is "Water+Wool=Heat". A lot of people simply do not believe that wool generates heat when it adsorbs water vapor. The way that wool handles water is one of the most important reasons for wearing wool. And anyone who doubts what wool can do can easily test personally by wearing some serious wool!
- Almost all our videos have a likes/dislikes ratio of 99:1 or 98:2
YouTube is a fantastic way to introduce ourselves to people, and to provide information about what we are doing. We need to find a way to make our content much much much more interesting!!
2025-08-11 ... ROUGHNECK WOOLSTOCK
This is a longer entry than usual, and it’s not entirely wool-related. But it is part of WeatherWool, so it is appropriate.
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As a result of him wearing our wool on TV’s MOUNTAIN MEN series, I’ve known Josh Kirk for five or six years. WeatherWool recently had a place on the beach in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. One fine evening, around midnight, we were enjoying some bourbon, some music and the sounds of the Atlantic surf. Josh is a terrific musician, singer, songwriter, and so music and performing was a natural part of the conversation. Josh lives in Wyoming. So does my younger son, Zack, with his family. And Wyoming is now, by far, the most important source of our wool. (The upcoming Batch Innes-1 is sourced entirely from the Innes Ranch of Gillette, Wyoming.)
Musical events are in Josh’s DNA, and I told him about an idea I’ve had since 2010 or so. [The following may offend some people’s politics. But it does come back around to wool!] Beginning in 2007, I began to see how the American Energy Business can completely transform the fortunes of families, towns, and even regions. “Land Men” from the oil and gas companies began knocking on doors in 2007 in Northeastern Pennsylvania, looking to negotiate leases between energy companies and landowners. The enormous Marcellus Shale formation, underlying parts of PA, WV, OH and NY, had long been known to hold stupendous amounts of natural gas, but extraction was not economically feasible. However, new technology and rising prices changed the situation. The price of natgas had roughly tripled in the first few years of this century, and at the same time, horizontal drilling was developed. The convergence of these events caused a land rush in the Marcellus. Here’s a favorite story, as told to me by a friend:
A guy was employed by my friend as a forklift driver. A very hardworking, dedicated guy. Like many people in Northeast Pennsylvania, this worker lived on a farm that had been in his family for generations, and he loved his land. But changes in America’s farm economy made huge numbers of family farms unprofitable, and there is no end to the numbers of small farmers who had to sell their land, give up farming, take jobs in town to (barely) hang onto the farm. So, this forklift driver would get up extra-early every morning, work his farm, then drive a forklift, then work the farm again after his day-job. And he spent his weekends working the farm. This is a hardworking guy, and you’ll find people like this, in this situation, all over the USA. But for farmers whose land happened to sit on top of the prime parts of the Marcellus, the situation changed drastically in 2008 or so. My buddy’s employee signed a gas lease, got a big signing bonus – probably more than he’d earn in 10 years driving the forklift – and monthly royalties started coming in. He was suddenly making more each month on royalties than he’d been making in a year working his job. But he kept driving the forklift, and my friend kept waiting for him to resign. One day, he walked into my friend’s office, wanting to talk. My friend figured he’s going to give him notice. But NO! He wanted a new forklift, with heat and air conditioning, so he could work more comfortably. And he said HE’D BUY THE FORKLIFT!!
There are many, many similar stories in the Marcellus, and many similar stories all over the USA where resource extraction has immensely improved the financial situation for people who had been land-rich but otherwise poor. And for the rest of us, the price of natgas has fallen by two-thirds or even more in the last 15 years or so. Most American homes are heated by burning natgas. [The political part is that many people believe burning carbon-based fuels like natgas will cause the earth to overheat. On the flip side, other people think plants are currently starved for the carbon dioxide produced by burning natgas, and that more CO2 in the air is a good thing.]
The Marcellus and the energy industry have been transformative for many parts of the country, for my family, and even for the wool business. As a result of the wool biz, I spoke with a bunch of customers who were energy workers or business folks. Zack had been unhappy working in New York City, and I’d been telling him to HEAD WEST, YOUNG MAN, where things were booming. In 2012, Alex and a friend were about to drive off to Wyoming on a hunting trip. A couple of days before Alex left, I got a call from a customer who told me he worked in oil and gas in Wyoming, and he could certainly get Zack an interview. Zack spoke with him, and two days later, he drove off with Alex and … he’s made a wonderful life for himself in Wyoming. As for WeatherWool, a lot of our customers work in energy. As for the wool industry … it’s VERY difficult to make a living as a Sheep Rancher. Like the family farms that are struggling nationwide, so it is with ranches … particularly Sheep Ranches. In Wyoming, energy royalties and jobs make it possible for many people to keep raising sheep, as their ancestors have done for generations.
Despite being the American State with the smallest population (more antelope than people), Wyoming is America’s leading State with regards to the production of fine wool … the type of wool we need. And because of its small population, wool is more important in Wyoming than any other State. Wyoming is our biggest source of wool. Remarkably, Wyoming also leads all States in the production of wind energy, coal and uranium. On a per capita basis, Wyoming is among USA’s leading oil and natgas States.
Circling back to the surfside talk with Josh, the subject of musical events came up, and I told Josh that I’d long believed the American Energy industry has the power to continue to change the USA in a very very positive way, and that this ought to be celebrated. So, we decided to do exactly that. Adding wool to the mix, Zack’s wife, Carla, came up with the name Roughneck Woolstock. ROUGHNECK for the workers in the energy fields, and WOOLSTOCK pulling together WOOL and WOODSTOCK. A big THANK YOU to Carla!
Brenn Hill, a friend of Josh who has a lifetime’s experience as a composer, performer, and promoter of musical events, likes the idea enough to join us in putting together the first Roughneck Woolstock in September of 2026, probably in Lander, Wyoming.
This HAS TO BE the most-unexpected direction in which WeatherWool has led me!
A couple of days ago, the poem below just sort of poured out of Brenn, and it may become the lyrics to an original composition. Maybe Brenn will debut it at Roughneck Woolstock!
Heart of Wool
Grandpa had a heart of wool
Spun strong through the Depression
When hunger pains left mental scars
To waste was indiscretion
No one had in excess here
You learned that things that last
Are not to be discarded ever
And damn you learned that fast
For though the man was kind to all
His temper had a blade
Respect and honor mattered most
It’s how the man was made
Horses, sheep, and cattle were
A way of life for him
Land and water sacred gifts
And all life came therein
And so I can remember still
Now thirty years have passed
His coats and hats were made of wool
For wool is made to last
He was not a man of wealth
Of any worldly measure
Though if an honest life is gold
The man had endless treasure
He feared no one but the Lord
He owed no one a dime
He would not suffer fools
And Grandad never wasted time
And I will not ever forget
That snowy Autumn morn
We rode far down in Yellow Creek
My coat was wet and torn
And that old Wyoming wind was bitter
I was only twelve years old
Grandpa must’ve seen me shiver
Wincing in the cold
He reigned up hard and started
On the buttons on his coat
The old striped blue one made of wool
That collared round his throat
So many times he’d worn it
On the coldest nights and days
He said it owed him nothing
Though he’d not throw it away
He motioned to me with a nod
To ride up on his side
And handed me that old blue coat
With just a hint of pride
It was wet with snow and heavy
But damn it got me warm
While Grandad in his old wool shirt
Rode headlong in the storm
We found the heifers that we missed
While on the big fall gather
And through his hard set jaw
He said “I’m glad that we’re together”
Now Grandad has so long since passed
The world has changed so much
Expendable, disposable,
And all so out of touch
With all the things I learned from him
The code of work and grit
You set your heart and mind like stone
And by God never quit
Grandad had a heart of wool
Pure fiber woven strong
And like the woolen clothes he wore
His memory lives on
- Brenn Hill
Brenn Hill’s Grandpa and big Sis (1970 something)
2025-08-08 ... Denim World
WeatherWool has surely led me to some unexpected places and a prime example would have to be the "Denim World".
It's come up here a bunch of times that as a result of stumbling onto the fact that Denim is a way of weaving, I'm now getting into the World of Denim. I knew Denim was big stuff, much beloved, but I didn't know HOW BIG!
I've been visiting the site of Denim Hunters occasionally for a couple of years, and I've learned that (Cotton-Jeans) Denim is even more of A THING than I knew. We would never have gone into production with our own 100% Wool Denim if I didn't really, really like it. But part of the reason we did the Denim in the first place was that I hoped The Denim Lovers would, in their searches for new types of Denim, find our Denim. And that is happening, with happy results all around. But also, I'm learning that Denim World is wider and deeper than I'd suspected.
The Denim Hunters has a very active website, patrolling Denim World, reporting on what's new and interesting and who is doing what. They are also publishing a newsletter, to which I subscribed a few days ago. Today's edition had news about Denim Dudes, another Denim Destination, but this one mostly for professionals. The main Dudes are actually Dudettes -- NICE! -- describing themselves as "... THE DENIM INDUSTRY'S LEADING CONSULTANCY FIRM." ... "UNCOVERING CULTURE TODAY TO HELP YOU DESIGN TOMORROW." The Dudettes subscription plans start at $500 annually.
One thing that has bugged me and even saddened me a little since I've become part of the garment biz is that SMILES are almost gone from the photos. Very few of the models or the designers look happy. I don't get it. I was brought up to say CHEESE for the camera. It's nice to see happy people. The Dudettes photos have big smiles and they look happy and that makes me want to get in touch!
Denim World has already begun to welcome, on a very small scale, some Old Youngblood. This is going to be interesting, exciting, and fun!
2025-08-07 ... Looms Update ... US Import Tariffs
In order to get our looms working properly, we need to buy new harnesses. And because I have only the most general idea of what harnesses do, I checked with GROK:
In weaving, a harness (also called a shaft or frame) is a key component of a loom that controls the warp threads. It holds a set of heddles, which are metal or string loops with eyes through which individual warp threads are passed. The harness raises or lowers these threads to create the shed, an opening through which the weft thread is passed to form the weave.
Functions of a Harness:
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- Lifts Warp Threads: The harness raises or lowers specific warp threads according to the weave pattern, creating the shed for the weft to pass through.
- Controls Pattern: By using multiple harnesses (common in multi-shaft looms), different combinations of warp threads can be lifted, allowing for complex patterns like twills, satins, or intricate designs.
- Organizes Threads: Each harness holds a group of warp threads, keeping them aligned and organized during weaving.
- Facilitates Shed Creation: The movement of harnesses, controlled by the weaver (via treadles, levers, or a dobby/jacquard mechanism), forms the shed, enabling the weft to interlace with the warp.
I'm guessing, paying some respect to Mr Murphy, this pushes us into November before we are weaving on our own looms. It doesn't change anything else, though ... Jacquard-loom weaving (FullWeight and MidWeight Fabrics) will continue as before at MTL and Dobby-loom weaving (Denim, Whipcord, Heritage Fabrics) will continue at American Woolen.
Tariffs remain big news. They don't seem to have affected us much, actually. Somewhat less business with our Canadian friends, maybe, but it's hard to be sure because there are so many other factors involved. If tariffs in EU really remain at 0, that will certainly help. We have growing numbers customers in EU Countries. In any case, whatever tariffs are assessed are added to the retail price and paid by our customers to their own governments, so we are not involved.
But I'm actually thinking about the effect of tariffs on people importing into the USA. We don't import anything (except, recently, looms, and we did pay tariff of about 3%), but if we did, the tariff would be applied to our wholesale price, not the retail price.
Friends of ours have worked for some of the very big retailers of outdoor-oriented clothing. And I expect what they have told me is not typical. But it's interesting and kind of amazing and relevant in the tariff context. Some of these famous retailers will purchase shirts made in Asia at $10 and offer them, at first, at $100. So even if the tariff is 20%, they'd be paying $12 instead of $10. It's virtually irrelevant with a 900% pre-tariff markup. They don't sell all the shirts at $100 ... but they sell some ... then they start marking down ... and marking down some more ... and ... it keeps going.
And while $10/$100 sounds extreme, I've been told as low as $6/$100. This is hearsay, but I know the people who told me believed it, and had an insider's view.
2025-08-06 ... Batch Innes-1, Whipcord Shirts, MidWeight Lynx Anoraks
The first pieces of complete Batch Innes-1 Fabric, in Drab Whipcord, are waiting for my pick up at American Woolen. WOW, this has been a long time coming! More than three years since we first visited the Innes Ranch (Wyoming) and more than two years since we purchased the first fiber for this Batch.
I didn't expect Whipcord to be the first Fabric completed from this Batch. But that's how the logistics worked out.
I also didn't expect to be offering Drab Green Whipcord Shirts so soon, but, no point in sitting on the Fabric. And so, our first pieces offered from Batch Innes-1 are Whipcord Shirts in Drab Green and Anoraks in MidWeight Lynx Pattern.
It was with great pleasure that I just sent a swatch of the Whipcord Fabric, complete with an Innes Ranch Label, to Bob Innes, The Innes family has not yet seen anything made solely from their wool. That will change very soon!
WeatherWool is delighted to sew this label into all garments made solely from wool grown on the Innes Family Ranch in Gillette Wyoming! The label features an Innes Brand, registered with the State of Wyoming. Thanks to Bob Innes for allowing us to use his brand!
2025-08-05 ... Woolmark Highlights (Part) Wool Denim
We remain huge fans of Woolmark, the marketing arm of the Australian Wool Growers ... BUT ... sometimes I feel even Woolmark doesn't really GET IT. Woolmark keeps publishing pieces on wool combined with other fiber.
Woolmark has just published a piece on Wool Denim, but their focus is on adding wool to other fibers ... cotton, cotton fleece, TEC/cotton, polyester, Lycra, hemp, viscose, polyamide, elastane, linen, silk, paper. At least they mention 100% Wool Denim, but the only two suppliers, Zegna (Italy) and Miyuki Keori (Japan), are not offering it yet, and evidently plan to offer only suiting (lightweight) fabric. Nothing wrong with suiting but I think people normally expect Denim to be heavier. (YEAH, people also expect Denim to be cotton!) The suiting is 240 grams per square meter (7 ounces per square yard). Our Denim is about 440 gsm / 13 opsy.
I may be jumping into quicksand here, but I commented on Woolmark's Instagram (Wool Denim) post:
Woolmark might reasonably clobber my comment because they are all about AUSTRALIAN WOOL. But I cite them often because they are such a great resource, and I really appreciate what they do!!
2025-08-03 ... Versatility ... Newsletter/Email
I forgot to mention in previous entry, but the easiest way to get on our mail list is to send a note to Ralph@WeatherWool.com
We design for VERSATILITY more than anything else. If someone asks what we are about: always 100% USA, always 100% wool, always VERSATILE:
- Comfort across a wide range of Weather
- Appropriate in a wide range of social settings
- Appropriate across a wide range of outdoor and even indoor activities
- Serviceable across many levels of physical exertion, from sedentary to vigorous
- Skin-soft but also tough and durable
Our trademark HARDCORE LUXURY® is my attempt to put all that into two words, but people don't really pay attention, or think about it.
A few days ago, we were thinking if a picture is worth 1000 words, a photo montage could be a good way to convey the VERSATILITY concept. Here is a first take at some concept art from Cody:
We (mostly Cody!) will be updating this image with new photos and would very much appreciate any contributions photos if you have cool photos of you wearing WeatherWool walking towards the camera or have and words/experiences/ideas. Thank You.
We intend to get photos of our Ranchers and their sheep in all kinds of Weather.
For a long time, we've had a page dedicated to Versatility, and we've always welcomed material here, too!
