Wool
Processing wool and making clothes of wool was an autochthonous manner of using wool on the Island of Cres. Later on, the wool was bought up and sent for processing to textile factories. However, in the last thirty years, the buying up of wool and lamb skin has stopped because processing of wool in Croatia, for economic reasons, totally died down. The reason was the supposedly poor quality of wool, that is, the fine texture of wool that did not satisfy the needs of textile production, and transport costs, which were too high for the use of wool for some other purposes to pay off.* Sheep-farmers could not do anything else but to leave the wool outside after sheep shearing. Wool is not biodegradable or flammable, so it can not be burned. This makes it a big aesthetic problem and an even bigger ecological problem. Nothing grows under wool, and pastures are becoming smaller. Disposal of wool and skin on the town landfill is not allowed because their disposal, allegedly, causes the appearance of rodents.
* On the islands of Cres and Lošinj, mostly on Cres, about 25 000 sheep are still bred, mostly of the Creska Pramenka breed. Of this number, 4500 are owned by the Cres Agricultural Cooperative, and the others are privately owned. Since 1960 sheep have been extensively bred with pasture rotation. About twenty tonnes of wool is sheared every year and left on and behind hedges, in holes and bushes, along paths, or somewhere where they deface the landscape and pollute the environment.
* We could no longer watch this discarded treasure and there was nothing else to do but pull up our sleeves and turn that waste into a valuable resource.
Wool-gathering
We work with several sheep-farmers who are sorry that they have to dispose of wool, they think it is a shame and a "sin", and are happy that someone wants it and more than happy to give it to us.* The long and harsh wool of Creska Pramenka cannot be compared to the fineness of the merino wool. A bigger problem, however, is the filth that gets tangled into fleece while sheep are wondering along pastures and passing through bushes and woods – blueberry needles, leaves, twigs, thorns and grass and seeds the spreading of which depends on whether they will attach to some "means of transportation" or not.
* When we get wool from pastures properly maintained by their owners, it's a cause for celebration. Other wool needs to be tossed and turned several times; large chunks and faeces need to be removed, and hard, tangled parts of fleece must be separated everything that is not worth scouring.
Scouring
In the first year "pulling up sleeves" meant "pulling up trousers", and more. We tried scouring wool in the sea. This attempt, which was not documented in photographs, involved a fishing boat dragging bags with wool. The discussion about the maximum speed in order to avoid the felting of wool by waves and the currents did not yield a conclusion.* During the following two seasons, we tried different combinations of fresh and sea water, but the transport of wool to the sea and back was everything but cost-effective. After five or six dips into the sea, after it released tonnes of mud, when dipped into fresh water, the wool looked as dirty as it was in the beginning.
* One scouring of 1 kg of wool requires 10 litres of water. In order to save on tap water we started collecting rain from the rooftop of the house that we were allowed to use by our benefactors, Cresanka d.d. In time, this became a plant for the collection of rain of which there is more than enough on Cres during winter and in the spring. We were also assisted by Labud d.d. which made a mixture of detergent specially intended for wool scouring on the basis of a recipe they found somewhere in their production plant covered in dust and almost forgotten (they have not used it for quite a long time). The number of necessary waters for scouring and rinsing was, thus, halved into 3, and the capacity became more economical.
Sorting
Drying wool is a very picturesque sight - until the first gust of wind when it is scattered all over the place.* Although we sometimes dye wool, natural colours are most appreciated. Luckily, the wool of sheep from Cres does not lack colour: if we are lucky, after drying, we may find white, yellow, brown, black, and shaded red and purple colours. The majority, what remains after the separation of toned wool, is the "wool white" colour – grey, yellowish or ochre.
Combing wool
Until 2005 we were lucky because in Croatia there was still one man who was willing to comb our 2, 3, 5 or 50 kilograms of sorted wool that we had worked so hard to prepare. Wool carding or combing is a machine procedure whereby unkempt wool is passed over a series of rollers covered in thin wire teeth resulting in a uniformly dispersed layered raw material. Afterwards, it may be spun into threads, yarn, but, for felting, we need only such combed wool.* Then the Kušen craft – after four generations of wool carders – closed its door, and its location, on the Bjelovar market, was occupied by a much profitable activity – an office building.
Finally
Making felt souvenirs, a path explored by Ruta, or woollen handicrafts or objects could be interesting in a country of rich folklore and long tradition of using wool - such as Croatia - a country which also desires to be a tourist destination.* On the basis of experience gained and the interest in wool, and demand, shown by many who see us, we have seen that wool processing could be a profitable family craft or a smaller production plan even now when wool mills are closing all around Europe and wool is processed in countries with a lot of cheap labour force or coming from industrial plants in Australia and New Zealand.
* We have firmly decided to use our domestic Pramenka wool for everything we make. In spite of everything, we somehow manage every year to get a few hundreds of kilograms of our own wool. Buying international merino wool would be too cheap and too simple - we want to show that other forgotten and neglected treasures lie all around us.