I love wool blankets, especially vintage ones, and I recently picked up a great vintage Fairibault wool blanket at a garage sale for a reasonable price to use camping. It's not quite as soft as our vintage Pendleton blanket, which is on our bed all winter long, but it's still a great blanket.
I checked out the Fairibault Woolen Mills website and the company is still going strong. I saw their collection of shawls and of course I wanted one (you get to wear a wool blanket!), but they go for $165. They're a simple design, so I decided to make one.
I bought 2 yards of heavy wool plaid flannel at SR Harris for $15 per yard after the sale discount. Make sure the fabric looks good from both sides. I cut the center front/neck opening as described in this video and hemmed the sides and front opening (dimensions: CB length 40", CF length 38" [both measurements include length of fabric that would get fringed], back width 52" before 1/2" hems on both sides). I stay-stitched 5" from the bottoms and started to pull out the weft fibers for fringe. I didn't know it when I started, but pulling out the threads for 5" of fringe took a LONG time- probably a total of 6-7 hours, because of the weave (not a flat weave, but herringboned in many sections of the plaid, and the fibers broke easily so you couldn't pull out long sections). I did it while watching TV, so it wasn't too bad. Next, I manually twisted the fringe, which took about another 4-5 hours (including the tedious step of thread-tying the ends of each fringe bundle since they weren't remaining twisted). I made an attempt at wet-felting the fringe bundles to help them adhere, but it didn't seem to help at all, so I followed up with a good steaming.
While the project ended up taking longer than I'd expected, the final cost was $30 and it's very cozy.
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