About Cashmere

Cashmere wool comes from cashmere goats living in an extremely cold climate on the high plateau of the Gobi desert, which stretches across China, Mongolia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The name comes from the region of Kashmir, which lies in northern India. Very few goats live in this area today however.

The goats have an extremely warm and soft undercoat that protects them during the winter. In the spring, when the goats start to shed their winter coat, they are combed to extract the downy undercoat, while the remaining wool, known as the outer coat, is left out. The undercoat is washed and then sent to factories to be spun into yarn. It takes about two to four years for a goat to produce enough wool to knit a cashmere sweater.

Many cashmere sweaters burl at first. This is normal, when the wool is spun into yarn it has different lengths of the fibre. Shorter fibres tend to crawl out on the surface after use and burls result. Burls are most often seen in areas exposed to friction, such as forearms. You can easily remove them with a thin comb or by hand. After washing the sweater a few times the burling tend to go away and the sweater becomes even softer.

In knitting, the term gauge (gg) is often used, and it refers to the number of stitches per inch. Basically you can say that a higher guage indicates a thinner sweater. Cashmere sweaters are mostly knitted in 8 gg, 12 gg and 16 gg. Our products.