Suiting wool

The name covers light and medium-weight wool cloths that hold their shape, hardly crease and drape in soft folds. Suits, trousers, skirts, jackets and dresses are made of them.

The best suiting is woven from worsted yarn: long combed fibres twisted into a fine even thread. The cloth comes out smooth, with a crisp weave. Yarn of shorter fibres gives a softer, fuzzier cloth such as flannel.

Gabardine: a dense cloth with a sharp diagonal rib. It holds a trouser crease and hardly creases.

Twill: a diagonal-ribbed cloth, softer than gabardine. The most common weave for suits.

Flannel: soft, slightly brushed, warm. For winter trousers, jackets and skirts.

Houndstooth: a small pattern of jagged checks, as in the photo above. Herringbone: stripes of slanted dashes that change direction. Pinstripe and Prince of Wales check are suiting classics too.

A pattern needs extra fabric: it has to match at the seams and fronts, and large checks across as well. People usually add 10 to 20 % to the usual amount.

Wool is often mixed with other fibres. Polyester makes the cloth stronger and nearly crease-free, viscose adds softness and sheen, elastane lets it stretch. Such pieces in our shop are called «Wool blend».

You can check the content with a burn test: wool leaves brittle ash, synthetics hard beads. The details are in the article «How to tell wool from synthetics».

At 1.5 m wide: straight trousers 1.2 to 1.5 m, a straight skirt 0.7 to 1 m, a skirt below the knee 1 to 1.5 m, a jacket 1.5 to 2 m, a two-piece suit 2.7 to 3.2 m, a dress 2 to 2.5 m. More in the articles on trousers, skirts, dresses and jackets.

Each of our pieces is sold whole with its exact size, so compare it with your pattern and remember the extra for a pattern.

Before cutting, steam the cloth through a damp cotton cloth so it does not shrink later: the details are in «Decatising». Iron through a cloth too: direct contact with the iron makes wool shine.

Finished garments are best dry cleaned, or washed by hand at 30 °C with a wool detergent, not wrung, and dried flat. More in «How to wash wool».