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Denim
Traditional denim is an indigo-dyed twill made of cotton. Denim's toughness, durability and inexpensiveness have made it into one of the world's most popular fabrics. But there are drawbacks to the traditional denims: cotton fabric is environmentally costly, cold and uncomfortable when wet, slow to dry and has little stretch. Denim manufacturers have tried to overcome these drawbacks by blending cotton with other fibers. Stretch jeans, for example, are made with a blend of cotton and synthetic fibers to marry the strength and durability of cotton with the stretchiness of nylon.
Denim Wool
Denim wool is a blend of cotton fibers and wool fibers. Denim wool is usually 85 to 90 percent cotton and 10 to 15 percent wool. The wool makes the denim warm and comfortable, and gives it elasticity while retaining the strength of cotton denim. Denim wool is primarily manufactured in Australia, where a high concentration of sheep farms makes wool inexpensive.
Making Wool Washable
One of the biggest challenges of making denim wool is the problem of washability. Cotton denim can be machine washed and tumble dried without shrinking or losing its shape -- but one tumble in a dryer can shrink a wool garment to doll-size. Wool shrinks because of microscopic scales on the individual strands of wool. The wool used in denim wool is treated to make it machine washable, either with acid to remove the scales from the fibers or with polymers to coat the scales.
Making the Denim Wool
Once the raw wool is treated to make it washable, the treated wool is carded together with the raw cotton in the desired ratio. Carding aligns the fibers and makes the wool/cotton blend ready to spin.
Next, the blended fibers are factory-spun into yarn. Denim is made of two different thickness of yarn: a thin white yarn that runs vertically (the warp threads) and a slightly thicker blue yarn that runs horizontally (the weft). The warp yarn is bleached white and the weft thread is dyed blue. Traditionally, the tropical plant indigo was used to dye denim, but today various synthetic dyes are more common.
Once the threads are bleached and dyed, they are woven together on machine looms. The finished denim wool is then sewn into jeans or other clothing. The final wool denim is machine-washable like traditional denim, but soft and warm like wool.