Resilient wool leads the field

Press, 19 April 1982, Page 9

Resilient wool leads the field

To an increasing extent, the bounce and resilience of Bremworth carpets is springing up in homes and commercial premises throughout the world. The firm attributes the widening popularity of its carpets to design excellence, superior performance and sound marketing techniques developed in recent years. The products offered with such success overseas are also offered at home in New Zealand. To publicise its carpet products in this country, U.E.B. Industries. Ltd, has declared April to be Bremworth month at its various New Zealand outlets. At the heart of Bremworth’s success is a remarkable carpet fibre, originally developed at Massey College by Dr F. W. Dry. Each fibre of the special wool, known as double-N Drysdale, has a hollow structure that makes it more

flexible and outstandingly resilient. No other wool or man-made fibre can match it. Bremworth carpets contain Drysdale wool along with other carefully selected carpet wools, and' are produced as a range of hardwearing, long-lasting, pure wool and wool-rich floor coverings. Frdm the largest woolcarpet tufting plant in the Southern Hemisphere. Bremworth manufactures tufted carpets styled to meet international demands — highfashion plains. " velvet flushes, rugged Berbers, colourful tweeds. Then there are the Axminster and Wilton woven carpets that can be supplied from a wide range of popular stock styles or custom designed to meet individual colour schemes or corporate designs. The tufted carpets come in

366 cm widths and the woven products in 69cm. 91cm. 100 cm and 366 cm widths. In both cases, pile weights can be varied to meet traffic conditions. The Woolmark label is an international quality mark that indicates whether the carpet is designed for light, medium or heavy duty, domestic or commercial use. Besides pile weight, the structure of the carpet also has a bearing on the sort of wear a carpet can take. Most carpets are now tufted, which means they are produced on a large sewing machine rather than by the older method of. weaving. The simplest tufted product is a loop pile carpet. More processing is required in the production of multi-level loop pile, cut pile, Saxony and shag pile. The “natural" look known as Berber is created from several yarns in natural colours and containing effects such as "neps." "slubs” and "flames." They are most often in coarse gauge loop pile but are also made in cut pile. A recent development in

carpet manufacture has been the introduction of a felting process to cause the wool fibres to interlock under controlled conditions. This gives a firmer yarn and a more resilient pile. Felting the yarn also reduces shedding and gives novel textures, such as a raindrop effect in cut pile and a nobbly or chunky effect in loop pile products.

Bremworth was in the forefront of this development with the production of Castillian. a heavy duty, cut pile Berber carpet. In Bremworth's entire range, only the Axminsters. which were taken over by Bremworth from Marlin, and the plain colour, hard-twist "Cossack" are not 100 per cent wool. A fourth design has just

been added to a new selection of all wool woven carpets that have tonal effects instead of the strong pattern traditionally associated with the woven products. Going the other way, in design, are Bremworth’s dramatic Persian-style, woven, all wool rugs and runners, being given a major promotional boost at present on both sides of the Tasman.