Shearing

In Morocco the fleece comes off once a year, at the end of spring. The season opens in late May across the Atlas: the flocks are gathered at the fold, or at the laazib, the seasonal camp of the transhumant herds, and the men of the douar shear together under tiwizi, the Amazigh custom of collective work owed and returned. It is done by hand with heavy iron shears, the maqass, with no machinery, and it goes to a rhythm; the older shearers remember songs that set the pace and calmed the animals. At the end the owner of the flock feeds everyone under a tent. The fleece is gathered as it falls and piled, and from that moment it is wealth: bedding, blankets, and the rug that will outlast the people who made it.

What the sheep gives depends on where it wintered. The breeds of the High and Middle Atlas, and the Siroua sheep of the Anti-Atlas, grow their fleece against a cold winter, and the Siroua wool in particular has long been the preferred raw material for carpet weaving across the Amazigh regions. Shorn in spring, the wool carries a full winter of growth and most of its lanolin, and it is hand-spun; the irregularity of the spindle is what gives a hand-spun pile its light.

The second shearing happens on the loom. In a pile-knotted rug the knots are tied with their ends long and ragged; the weaver clips them, row by row or once the piece is finished, to bring the pile to a single height. Where she stops the scissors sets the pile height, from the medium pile of a Boujad to the deep ivory of a Beni Ourain. Shearing also explains why a new pile rug sheds: the short fibres the scissors leave behind work their way out over the first months of use, then stop.

Both cuts are judgement, not machinery. A fleece shorn too early is thin; a pile sheared too low loses its depth and its softness together. Tilwen does not re-shear vintage pieces to even out wear; the low path across an old field is part of what it is.