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"Planning on flexing your sartorial muscles in the blog arena? You'll need to come packing. And no, we're not referring to your pocket square game. Every week on The Eye, we'll cover a basic term you need to know right now... before you get laughed off the internet.\n\nFacebookPinterestDropping Knowledge Boiled Wool 600.jpg\n\nStep one: Fill a pot with three cups of water. Step two: Bring to a boil. Step three: Toss in wool coat. Step four: Ruin your coat. If boiled wool were easy, we all would have spent this past week in our kitchens converting our beloved jackets and coats into boiled wool masterpieces, but in reality all we'd get is a bunch of outerwear that looks straight out of Baby Gap. But who could blame us for trying? Thanks to a never ending stream of street style shots coming out of Pitti Uomo this season (we're a bit biased, but we think Tommy Ton was the cream of that crop) we've all had boiled wool on the brain.\n\nThis year at Pitti, it wasn't Nick Wooster or Josh Peskowitz who came out as the street-style king of the week, it was boiled wool. The felt-like texture was popping up everywhere and with good reason, as it's deceptively warm for its weight, is a solid material no matter what the weather, and doesn't have all the itchy properties that normally steer people away from the fiber in the first place. So the question remains, how is such a remarkable material produced?\n\nThe process is actually not too far off from the initial recipe up there. Raw wool is placed into boiling water to shrink and constrict the fibers of the textile, giving it the softer and tighter feel that makes for a warmer, more durable end product. Nowadays, this technique is performed using massive washing machines in equally large factories, but historically the process of making boiled wool would've looked less like an oversized laundromat and more like a witch's brew.\n\nBoiled wool dates back to the Middle Ages, and quite possibly even before that, as craftsmen would boil massive cauldrons of water and toss their wool to take the edge off the raw material. While the procedure has certainly changed over the centuries, the end result is still the same: a warmer, heartier, and more wearable wool with a touch of texture tossed in there for good measure. And that's a recipe we can all work with.\n\nJake Gallagher writes the blog Wax-Wane. He lives in Manhattan.\n\nRead more Dropping Knowledge:\n\n Dropping Knowledge: The Cowichan Sweater\n\nDropping Knowledge: Brogues\n\nDropping Knowledge: The Belstaff Trialmaster Jacket"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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