Cirrus : Our Possum & Cashmere Blend - Perino by Woolyarns
Cirrus - The Highest Floating Cloud
Perino Cirrus by Woolyarns is a beautifully crafted yarn from the finest luxury fibres. Woolyarns Perino collection ensures luxurious fibre that provides unequivocal warmth whilst ensuring sustainable and ethical sourcing. Cirrus is a combination fibre that incorporates different fibres and accompanying attributes to create a warmer, softer, stronger fibre.
An equal split of 40% to both brushtail possum down and cashmere makes for the softest, lightest and warmest fibre available at Ahipao, and 20% mulberry silk takes it over the top to being one of the finest luxury fibres available.
Brushtail possum fur is a biodegradable and natural fibre sourced from the Aotearoa pest species or Brushtail possum. The damage that Possums have inflicted on Aotearoa's ecological systems has been drastic. Due to the damage to native flora and fauna, the New Zealand Animal Welfare Act has strict enforcement to humanely and efficiently trap possums. The management and control of possums in nature have managed to keep our forests happily thriving.
The use of possum fibre is essential to preserving Aotearoa's natural life, but it's also an extraordinary fibre with many properties. Possum fur is very unique and produces hollow hairs. The hollow hairs create so much warmth that they cannot freeze, the only fur other than the polar bear that can boast such an attribute. These hairs are extremely warm, durable, and soft, with a low propensity to pilling, making possum the perfect knitwear fibre.
Woolyarn sources its cashmere from the bottom of the South Island, Aotearoa, ensuring a locally sustainable and ethical practice. The South Island provides cashmere goats with an ideal lifestyle. The ideal climate, with Antarctic winds rolling over the hills and rich soil making nutrient feed, makes the goats perform better than anywhere else in the world. South Island farmers have recorded whiter, longer, softer and brighter cashmere fur that has been distributed locally and worldwide due to its unique properties.
Cirrus also combines the strength and softness of Chinese mulberry silk into its fibre. China is the birthplace of silk and discovered the luxury fibre over two thousand years ago. Mulberry silk is produced by silk caterpillars eating nothing but the leaves from a mulberry tree, creating a silk cocoon before metamorphosing into a domesticated moth. The cocoons are harvested and unwound straight from the cocoon as the caterpillars use one continuous thread of spit to create the cocoon. This creates raw silk from the outside of the cocoon, and fine silk, from the inside, each used for different purposes as they hold different properties. The thread must be smooth before the dying process, so workers sort through the fibre picking off any clumps. It's then dyed and processed. The silk process is long and complicated, which is why silk is a luxury fibre. It's a soft and strong natural fibre that can take up to a month of waiting for a caterpillar to reach metamorphosis to produce a small amount of silk. For perspective, it takes 5,500 silkworms to produce a kilogram of silk, or roughly 125 worms, to create a single silk tie.