The production of loden

Once a year, our international wool traders supply us with the wool of alpacas, merino sheep and cashmere goats. The wool of the Austrian mountain sheep is brought by the farmers of the region every six months (in spring and autumn). These tons of wool are then dyed and stored until their mission continues on the road to becoming loden. Because our loden fabrics are melanges, in other words a mixture of different colours, these are mixed together on the so-called carding machine according to a recipe in order to arrive at the right colour in the end. For a turquoise blanket, for example, blue, green, yellow and white wool are mixed together.  

The first process is carding. Depending on the quality and colour we want to achieve, the raw wool is mixed in the carding machine. The wool fibres are laid into a fine fibre fleece by rollers covered with scraper belts, which is then divided into strips and rounded into a roving at the so-called "Nitschelwerk". A roving is not yet tear-resistant. On the ring spinning machine, the tear-resistant woollen yarn is then created by continuously twisting and simultaneously stretching the roving. A yarn as we know it from everyday life.

Another special feature is the weaving. Loden fabric is often confused with fulling fabric. Colloquially, a fulling fabric is understood to be a knitted fabric. We use a woven fabric in the production of loden. Weaving is a process that pretty much all of us should know from our kindergarten days. There are the longitudinal threads (warp), which are fixed to the weaving frame, and the transverse threads (weft), which you manoeuvre alternately over and under the longitudinal threads. Fortunately, machines do this for us, at a speed where the weaving is almost invisible to the naked eye. Nevertheless, our trained weavers have a lot to do. Sometimes a thread can break and has to be reworked.

Now we come to the supreme discipline of loden production. Wool has the property of felting under the influence of moisture, soap, heat and friction. We make use of this property during the controlled rolling of the raw fabric in width and length. This is where the actual loden finally develops from the raw fabric. You can imagine the fulling process as a large washing machine. The fabric is additionally kneaded or hammered. You can still watch the process in detail on our 130-year-old hammer mill. The original Schladminger Loden, as well as all the lighter qualities of this type of fabric, are produced on this hammer mill in a very artisanal way. This is the only way to achieve the typical beaded effect.

4. REFINING