Evaluating Wool Shirt Comfort with Wear Trials and the Forearm Test

Abstract

The comfort of light-weight woven fabrics in the form of next-to-skin clothing is investigated by wear trials and the forearm test. The wear trial in neutral environmental conditions shows that light-weight wool and wool blend fabrics are generally less comfortable than the summer polyester, cotton poplin, and polyester/cotton, fabrics tested in this study. In terms of comfort, the main shortcoming of these light-weight wool fabrics is prickle. When the environmental temperature is high, especially when the body is sweating, the comfort of wool and wool blend fabrics is greatly reduced due to signifi cantly increased prickle. The forearm test in neutral environmental conditions shows that fabric-evoked prickle decreases with an increasing wool quality number, i.e., as the wool becomes finer. For light-weight wool and wool blend woven fabrics proddced from 70s quality and coarser wools, there is the potential problem of prickle when used as next-to-skin clothing materials.