Just curious. Could you make a useful sweater or coat from human hair?
Well, people have been know to make shirts from human hair, however, they are uncomfortable, look weird, etc.
I don’t know about sweaters or coats, but other items have been tried.
Pet dog hair can be handspun into “ordinary” yarn, somewhat like angora (in fact, called “chiengora” from French “chien”, “dog”), but dog hair is generally softer and fluffier—more fleecy, in fact—than people hair. I’d stick to the traditional practice of using your lover’s hair as embroidery thread.
When I was working with textiles in college I experimented with using my own hair for stuff… works as well as any other animal hair, really. How you process it after you cut it off the animal counts for a great deal as well - sweeping leavings up off a barber shop floor then spinning it into heavy twine doesn’t really give you a good sense of the possibilities.
The hard part, I’d think, would be getting enough hair of a consistent quality to make something worthwhile.
Rumor has it the Germans experimented with using human hair in manufacturing during the early 1940’s, but I don’t think it would be ethical to use thier methods of acquiring large quantities.
I have a sword from the far East, the hilt of which is bound in human hair. Apparently women used to grow their hair long, and it was only cut when they were married, and it was this hair that was used to bind the hilts. How true that is, I do not know, but it makes a nice story.
[http://wcm.krone.at/krone/C00/S2/A3/object_id__35889/hxcms/]This](http://www.krone.at/index.php?[url) is a dress made out of human hair.
Might be a bit chilly in winter…
That link doesn’t work. I’m sorry. Try this one.
I thought that human hair shirts or undergarments were worn by holy men as penance or mortification. Or were they made of animal hair?
First, you’d have to make the hair into some manner of textile. The hair (or fur) of other animals can be turned into textile by felting, by spinning the hairs into yarn which is then woven into textile, or by knotting/weaving individual hairs together.
Human hair wouldn’t felt well. Wool is felted by applying heat and pressure to shrink the fibers, which causes small scale-like structures on each wool fiber to “lock” to its neighbors. Human hair is generally too smooth for this to work effectively. Perhaps the hair of a person who can grow great dreadlocks would felt better.
So, you’d probably want to spin the hair. Longer hairs would yield softer, more supple yarn. Shorty hair would yield a scritchy, twine-like yarn. However, human hair is still smoother and of larger diameter than wool or silk fibers. Smoother fibers don’t stick to each other well, so I think the yarn would tend to fall apart in a way that wool would not. Also, the ends of the hair strands would stick out of the yarn, making a very scritchy yarn. Larger diameter fibers are less flexible, so the resulting yarn would not be a supple as a wool yarn with the same number of fibers in the strand. So, I think a sweater would be rather heavy, stiff, itchy, and slippery feeling. I think a coat would be impractical due to the weight.
You could also knot the fibers together, in the manner of bobbin lace or macrame. This would probably be your best bet for producing a supple, comfortable garment. It would be easy to join in new hairs at the knots without leaving ends sticking out. You could make a very fine and durable mesh shirt this way. It probably wouldn’t be very warm, and you’d probably want to wear something under it, since it’s mesh.
Depends on which humans you’re talking about. If you were standing in Beijing, no, most of the human hair you’d see would not felt well. If you were staning in a major Nigerian city, most of the human hair you’d see would make great felt.
After all, that’s basically what dreadlocks are.
Human is thicker in diameter than silk, but I doubt very much it is smoother than silk.