A new addition to our family of luxury fibers, Meridian Mill House now offers Mercerized Merino wool in 3 yarn weights: Fingering, DK, and Worsted. All are named after the gorgeous Lake Lure region of the Appalachians. In addition to a stellar constellation of unique qualities, our Mercerized wool – which is grown on ranches in the US Rocky Mountains – helps fill the gap left by the limited supply of fine micron wool in the US. More about that below, but first, we want to share a few of the reasons why you will love this yarn.
The Unicorn of wool fibers, Mercerized Merino has many unique qualities!
Mercerization markedly enhances the hand of Merino wool through a process that removes the scales on wool fiber, followed by the addition of a thin layer of micro-silicone. The advantages of this enhancement to Merino wool fibers are significant and include:
- A super smooth hand similar to cashmere that is soft enough for garments worn directly against the skin – even knitted products for babies and toddlers;
- A stronger tensile strength than regular wool;
- Noticeably increased brightness and luster;
- Washing without worry. Mercerized wool can be laundered, making it an ideal design option for active wear, underwear, winter base layers and warm weather knit products;
- The increased softness and brightness of Mercerized wool makes it ideal for blending with luxury fibers such as mohair, cashmere or silk;
- All of these characteristics are permanent to washing, dry cleaning and dyeing.
And it has a fine micron. As we touched on above, the supply of fine micron wool in the US is very limited. However, the demand is high. To fill this gap, The American Wool Council developed a process called Mercerization, which gives 20 micron wool the look and feel of 18 micron wool.
Knitted apparel made from Mercerized wool feels less prickly next to skin because the smoothed fiber surface, along with the silicone “lubricant,” helps any protruding fibers that might scratch the skin, slide back into the yarn on contact, exerting less pressure on skin nerve endings.
For those of you who love our undyed Super Wash, the Mercerization process is very similar to the super wash process and is even carried out on the same equipment at our go-to wool processing plant in Jamestown, South Carolina, which also does the carding.
We know you’ll like it. We brought samples with us to our booth at the Stitches fiber show in Sacramento, California, this month and visitors were very enthusiastic. Several even brought friends back to our booth to touch and see. Once again, here are the links to our Mill House Yarn Shop where you can buy our new Lake Lure Mercerized Merino Wool products, available in 3 weights — Fingering, DK, and Worsted. Sample skeins are only available for now because we want you to help test this new yarn with us! Let us know what you think of the yarn and share your research with us at customerservice@meridianmillhouse.com.
