Nepalese Pashmina

What is "Pashmina"?

Pashmina is the most luxurious, softest, warmest and lightest natural fiber in the world, and comes from the Capra-Hircus goat (pictured on the side). This is the same goat where cashmere comes from. The difference is that the pashmina only comes from goats resident above about 15,000 feet, and it only comes from the one part of the neck. The higher the goats live, the finer their hair. Genuine pashmina fibres are always less than 14.5 microns in diameter, or about 1/6th the size of human hair. It is hand-woven by skilled Nepali craftsmen in to wonderful shawls. Each shawls takes many man hours to complete. From the combing of the goat to collect the fur, through hand weaving, dying and finishing. Therefore every shawl is unique. Some places do sell machine made shawls, but the weave can never be as strong as with a hand made shawl. They have been popular amongst the Indian aristocracy for 500 years, and demand in the west has been massively increasing since they were first paraded on the catwalks of New York and Paris back in 1998.

How fine is Pashmina exactly?

A human hair is about 75 microns thick. Our Pashmina fibers imported from Mongolia and Tibet are 12 - 14 microns thick.

Please visit Wiki on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashmina to find out more about Pashmina.