Gorgeous vintage authentic famous world known Orenburg Russia goat down shawl. Handmade. Brown color. Brand new. 46" x 46". 

The quality is exquisite, outstanding. The quality of shawls that were made in 1970s and 1980s (before collapse of the USSR) is much, much higher than of those that made today.

Please read below about this shawl and all Orenburg shawls, in general.

Very classic, very, very warm and very cozy. A must for the cold days. I have to part with this, no need in California.

The famous Orenburg woven shawls are made entirely by hand. They are handspun and hand knitted from the finest down of goats in the region of Orenburg near Ural Mountains. The shawls have natural colors of the goats and can be white, gray or brown.                                                             

The down hair from Orenburg goats is really unique. It is very thin (15-17 microns) and quite long (60-80 mm), flexible, strong (much stronger than regular wool), low felting properties. That is why downy products are soft and pleasant to the touch. It is not for nothing that mother nature endowed our goats' down hair with such great properties. It is not easy to survive harsh winters and hot summers in Ural steppe without a good coat that could be shed in spring.  

The goats that live in Orenburg steppes are not big, but they survive in frost and cold that will be detrimental to any other goats.   

 From February to March, goats start shedding their hair in order not "get cooked" in their own coats during a warm season. This is when they get actively combed. Combing goats is a very time consuming and long process. Everything is done by hand, with the help of special combs. Downy thread is quite thick. Its thickness is about 1 mm, and the thickness of Orenburg goat down hair is only 14-16 microns. That is, each 1-mm-thick thread has about 70 down fibers.

The process of spinning takes much time and requires not only patience but also skill. Downy thread is extremely strong (the breaking load for down fibers is 8.2 kg). But that's not all. To make it even more practical, down thread is combined with cotton or silk thread by means of twisting them together, almost like a braid. This process is called rubbing. After rubbing, the thread becomes about 1.5-2 mm thick and is ready for a long and useful life as part of a downy product. 

 All above-described processes -from combing a goat to receiving a finished downy product - are manual labor, and not hours, but days and weeks of hard work.                                          

So, all in all, depending on the complexity of the product, it takes a knitter from 112 to 292 hours to produce ONE shawl.                                                 

People who, having received an Orenburg downy shawl as a gift, or having bought it, become proud owners of an authentic and top- quality product. Not just a warm shawl, but a talisman for life. Each stitch of this warm shawl adds to the bridge connecting generations; the shawl is passed from mother to daughter, and it does not lose either its shape or relevance, or its valuable properties.

With proper care, the service life of an authentic downy shawl can be 100 years or even more, and there are historical accounts that prove this fact.     

I TRY TO DESCRIBE MY ITEMS TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE AND ABILITY.

PLEASE PAY AT TIME OF PURCHASE.

ALL MY ITEMS ARE FROM A SMOKE AND PET FREE HOMES.

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