This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Bedding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Down Comforter Bedding
Down comforters equal good night sleep.27.04.2008
Only 226,000 people live in Iceland, but they are resilient and resourceful. For more then 1,000 years farmers and fisherman dangle over rocks and cliffs to pluck feathers from the nests of eider’s on Vigur Island to the west. For these people, down collecting is an integral part of their way of life. “Eiders are totally protected in Iceland, and in return they give their precious down,” says an ornithologist with Iceland’s Museum of Natural history. On Vigur Island in Iceland’s West Fjords, a farmer, Baldur Bjarnason, takes down from 4,000 eider hens. Each week in season, Baldur’s son Bjarni and the rest of his family gather feathers that line the ducks’ nests.
The female lays 4-6 eggs in the nest, lined with down which she plucks from her breast, there it becomes loose by the time the eggs arrive. She arranges the down underneath her and around the eggs; an extremely useful and productive measure in a cold climate. Watching the nests takes up to 4 weeks and in due course the female leaves the nest. The down, having served its prime purpose, is blown away by the wind or, more usefully, gathered by the eider farmer. The down is dried immediately after it is gathered, then heated to about 110 Degrees Celsius and kept at that temperature for a certain time; the heat sterilizes the down and makes it easier to clean. About 35 nests yield one pound of down at approximately $300.00 per pound.
The down is mechanically cleaned, in machines specially designed for the purpose, the process being based on age-old methods for cleaning eiderdown. With this equipment the down can be cleaned without damaging its special properties which give the down its insulating properties, cohesiveness and elasticity. No chemicals are used in the cleaning process. Although the machines do a good job of the cleaning, the down undergoes further checks in which any feathers or knots are removed by hand. Eiderdown exports from Iceland are subject to weight and quality control by an authorized quality inspector. Nothing beats the feel of a goose down comforter.
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