Aurora is a modified wool fibre for making one-bath, differentially-dyed yarns.The resulting yarns have either one leg dyed and the other resisted (barber pole), or they have two legs of different colours (marl).

How it works

The Aurora™ fibre can be dyed to dark shades with disperse dyes, which usually have only a slight affinity for wool.That is sufficient to give the differential dyeing needed to produce novel coloration effects.

Barber pole yarns

An undyed yarn is made with one leg containing Aurora™ fibre; the other leg containing unmodified wool. In a single dye-bath containing disperse dyes, the Aurora™ fibre takes up dye, but the unmodified wool takes up significantly less dye. Thus a range of barber pole yarns can be made from undyed, folded yarn. This eliminates the need for the batch processing route involving loose stock dyeing and spinning, with its attendant wastage and large stock-holding. Further, barber pole yarns can be produced by simple hank dyeing, without the difficult tasks of backwinding hanks of singles yarns, or package dyeing, then folding of singles yarns.

Marl yarns

A single dyebath containing disperse dyes and conventional wool dyes results in the Aurora™ leg containing mainly the disperse dyes, and the conventional wool leg mainly the wool dyes. Good colour separation of the two legs is possible. The advantages, in terms of reduced stock holding and simpler processing routes, are the same as for the barber pole yarns. The development of a variant with an enhanced differentiation of the two types of dye is currently under way.

3-fold yarns

3-fold options of the above yarns are available. The third leg may be either an intermediate-dyeing Aurora™ leg, or a pre-dyed leg. Both give yarns with interesting colour possibilities.