To make the best quality musk ox yarns we need to put the fibre through several stages of production. First of all, we begin with washing & conditioning the fibres. This removes any muck or grease that contaminates the raw fibre. The fibre is put onto trays to dry & sprayed with our own blend of Anti-static spray that also contains conditioning oils to help the fibre slip over the machines without causing any fibre damage.

Here at Cottage we buy in raw qiviut down, wash, pick, dehair, card, draft, spin & ply 100% Qiviut yarns & then some of our yarns go on to be made into knitwear in our Design studio.....

This is how a musk oxen looks when he's shedding his down in the spring.

The picture to the right shows raw Qiviut fibre in the picking room. The picker machine opens up the fibre before we move it to the fibre seperater machine.

Below is the fibre seperater machine, this machine runs 10 hours per day & 7 days aweek

Back of the carder machine

Once all the Guard hairs are removed from the fibre its time to move to the carding machine. This machine combs all the fibre into a soft web & then puts it into a soft sliver, the sliver falls into buckets & is compressed. We leave it to rest for a while before we move onto the pin draft machine.
The picture to the right shows the fibre entering the carding machine.

The front of the carder machine

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