Making Orenburg Shawls

1. Making Orenburg shawls is an entirely manual process involving skilled craftspeople and ancient Russian techniques. To start, a shawl maker washes goat down by hand.
2. Next, the shawl maker must manually comb through the down, sorting and removing the short fibers, along with any rough hairs.

3. After that, the down is carefully washed and air-dried, and combed several more times until it takes on an attractive sheen.
4. Only now can the spinning begin. The spindle, an ancient device now on display in museums, is exclusively used for spinning soft, fine hair into down thread.

5. The down thread is now spooled with natural silk or cotton fibers. The thread is then twisted to make it stronger and more durable.
6. Finally, the yarn is ready for knitting to begin.
7. shawls are knit by hand using old, elegant patterns that are evocative of nature: spiders, pine trees, cats' paws or frosty windows.

8. As with the rest of the process, shawls are inspected for quality using an ancient, time-tested method: if the scarf can be easily pulled through a wedding ring and fits perfectly into the shell of a goose egg, it is of verifiably high quality and is ready to be sold.