July 13, 2026
What is chiengora?
Chiengora is yarn spun from dog hair, specifically the soft undercoat a dog sheds with the seasons. The name joins the French chien, meaning dog, with angora, the fibre it most resembles in loft and halo. The craft is older than it sounds: people were spinning and knitting with combed dog hair long before commercial wool was widely available across North America. Fibre for fibre, chiengora is warmer than sheep wool. Textile references often put the difference at up to eighty percent, because an undercoat evolves to hold heat against the body through winter.
A short history
Spinning animal down into cloth is one of the oldest textile practices there is, and dog hair sits within it. On the Pacific Northwest coast, the Coast Salish peoples kept a small woolly dog whose hair was combed, spun, and woven into blankets, frequently blended with mountain goat wool and plant fibre, for centuries before European sheep arrived in the region. Those blankets were ceremonial objects, held and inherited rather than worn out.
The specific word chiengora is much younger. It was coined by North American hand-spinners in the 1980s, as a way to name a fibre that behaves less like a novelty and more like a cousin of angora. The name stuck because it is accurate: like angora, chiengora blooms.
How it compares
Every fibre has a temperament. Chiengora is warm and soft with a pronounced halo, but it has little natural spring, which is why it is so often paired with wool.
| Property | Chiengora | Sheep wool | Angora |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warmth | Very high; often described as up to 80% warmer than sheep wool | Moderate to high | High |
| Fibre length | Short to medium, varies by coat | Medium to long | Short |
| Halo / bloom | Strong; blooms with wear | Low to moderate | Strong |
| Elasticity | Low; little natural crimp | High; springy crimp | Low |
| Best role | Warmth and softness | Structure and memory | Softness and halo |
Chiengora gives warmth and a luminous halo but almost no elasticity, so a garment spun from it alone can stretch and lose its shape. Wool brings the crimp, the tiny coils that let a fibre stretch and return.
Why blend
Blending gets the best of two fibres at once. Wool contributes structure and memory: the ability to hold an edge and spring back. The companion fibre contributes warmth, softness, and meaning. A well-judged blend feels like wool with an unusual glow, and it keeps its shape across years of wear.
At Lunma, each scarf is spun from roughly eighty grams of a companion's shed strands with about one hundred grams of ethically sourced wool. The wool is doing quiet structural work; the strands carry the warmth and the story.
From collected strands to yarn
The path from a brush to a finished yarn is short in description and slow in practice. Shed hair is washed in several stages and finished at high temperature, sorted to keep the soft undercoat and remove coarse guard hairs, then carded with wool into a light roving. Only then is it spun. What arrives as loose down leaves as a balanced, wearable yarn.
Chiengora is the oldest idea in textiles: keeping warm with what an animal has already given, carried into a single, deliberate object.