written by: Iza

There are different ways you can fall victim to this craze, some are connived by logic, some take it seriously or as a temporary fad, then there are those, who go crazy by accident - that’s us ;) Our family went crazy by the way, the woolen craze just popped up and stayed for good, it was quick and painless. it spread and grew into our lives quickly and painlessly. Actually, the craze found us before we could find it. Here’s what went down: 

 In winter of 2015 our little Beast was born, which flipped my world upside down. Despite her beastly powers we named her rather innocently - Janka - and we imagined softly uttering even sweeter versions of it - Jasieńka, Janeczka ;) Soon I dubbed her the Beast, because she refused to sleep peacefully and demanded constantly being held by her parents. By mom, preferably, and it's best that mom is always on the move, because a sedentary mom somehow didn’t work as well for her, which prompted her to scream and shout. And so her mother (that’s me) had to walk around the house. When her paths in the apartment were trampled nice and deep, she moved to the great outdoors. And there it turned out that the stroller did not work for the baby as well, and mother's hands were numb from carrying the child in one hand and pushing the two-ton (super-extra-mega-awesome) stroller in the other. Thankfully there was another way. A rescue for the poor mother in the form of a simple device, unlike anything you find in science fiction or robotics genius’ dreams - just an (extra)ordinary piece of cloth. And so the desperate mother in need chanced upon the Brave New World of Baby Wraps! Initially she looks at a multitude of cotton options, because she doesn’t yet recognize the dangers of admixtures. But every now and then other baby-carrying moms recommend other options, like flax, hemp, wool, even silk! well, well… ;-) And so it began.

My life partner, a patient man fully confident in my new mom intuition, allowed me to buy a 5-meter rag and even smiled while he watched this new mom trying to tangle myself and the baby… What followed was a difficult and impossible to describe stage of learning to wrap ourselves in such a way that both mother and child are safe, they can breathe freely and maintain a somewhat correct posture to boot… Fortunately many specialists can teach you how to do it, so I can instead comment on the effects of this "scuffle" ;-).

Well, what this whole shebang brought my family was nothing but relief! I was no longer grounded! I quit struggling with the pram. The kid stopped shouting at me! A time of overall joy, harmony and silence has come… <3 Phew…

However, there were some extremely profound side effects. Back then, of course, they seemed quite innocent and my new fascinations prompted rather indulgent smirks from family and friends. After all, a young mom is entitled to her various "idiosyncrasies".

And then came the day when I told my beloved that I had made the first serious purchase of a HW baby wrap. For the uninitiated, this abbreviation means handwoven. It was a wrap with an admixture of magical merino wool. This is where things really took off. The world started spinning, glitter and fireworks flew across the sky, adorned by at least four rainbows ;-P I cannot be sure though, because at that moment I was completely busy searching the furthest corners of the internet to learn new ways of tangling. Trying out all combinations of cotton, wool, silk, hemp, flax and others, my head was spinning. It turned out, quite seriously, that using wraps with admixtures is a completely different story. A light popped up in my head and I finally understood what all the other girls were writing about when they mentioned the feeling of pillows on their shoulders and how they could carry an elephant on their backs for days. All possible combinations of admixtures have passed through my hands. In the end, what was left in my "pile" were only wraps with wool, one with cannabis and one woven from merino-cashmere. 

These side effects I mentioned earlier, concern not only me. Knowing and learning about properties of particular materials, especially merino wool, is now somehow a new hobby for my family, thanks to me, and now shopping for clothes looks a lot different than it used to ;-) We start by checking the composition of materials on the label before even taking the clothes of the hangers.

A simple road to madness? Simple - for starters it was enough to hate the pram and very much like to carry our little Beast ;-)