Making a traditional wool-stuffed mattress - first catch your sheep!

This is quite long and auto-dubbed but very much worth a watch.



The video was made by Eugenio Monesma who says...

Melquíades Hidalgo, among other things, makes wool mattresses in the town of Lumbier (Navarra). But Melki, as he's known to his family, is also part of a group of shearers who travel throughout the winter and spring months to shear flocks wherever their services are needed. In 2023, I learned about both of these traditional crafts in the making of an eco-friendly mattress.

Out of interest, the house we first lived in in Portugal had a very similar looking mattress, only with blue and white striped fabric and stuffed with straw.

I'm going to come back and watch it more carefully when I have more time, but even giving it 15 minutes and skipping around was great. (I do wish the translation were better -- I noticed lots of places where it just left words off.) We just bought an industrial mattress for our guest room and I considered making one, but decided that I didn't really have the time and couldn't half-ass it the way I could if I was the only one using it. Does it talk about how long a mattress like that will last?

Christopher Weeks wrote: (I do wish the translation were better -- I noticed lots of places where it just left words off.)  

Both the translation and the auto-narration are a bit below standard. Unfortunately my Portuguese isn't brilliant and my Spanish is all but non-existent else I'd be tempted to contact the guy and offer to narrate. His work is so worth supporting and sharing.

Does it talk about how long a mattress like that will last?

He said at least ten years. If I manage to find the place where he said it I'll edit it back in

Edit - it's at 39 minutes 41 seconds here, but I did a lot of skipping through the video myself to be honest as I didn't have that much time spare either.

Thanks for sharing! The mattress looks so comfortable. I wish they would demonstrate how springy it is at the end of the video, having some one sitting on the edge, laying down and rolling around etc.
It said it takes about wool from 19 sheep to make one mattress. Is washing wool going to be the most time consuming part if there is no facility around?

I have a wool filled duvet - likely heavier than a similar warmth of down, but it's awesome.

Traditionally, mattresses like that would have been flipped over monthly, and "aired" daily by pulling back the blankets to the foot of the bed for a couple of hours after you get up. Being in a humid environment, I not only pull the blankets back, but I point the dehumidifier output at our current mattress and turn it on for an hour or two. It makes a huge difference.

Burra wrote:

He said at least ten years.

 I suspect that like many locally made, natural fiber mattresses, at that point it would be taken apart and refilled so long as the fabric cover was in decent shape. The all natural insides would then be recycled to other tasks like mulching plants. I have read about a small business in Mexico that goes from village to village on a route "rebuilding" mattresses - I think those ones had springs in them, as well as fiber, but it's been a while.

Our current North American system is hugely wasteful - I'm not sure how much natural mattresses are even available if you do try to buy them. This is definitely an area where permification is in order.  

Jay Angler wrote: I suspect that like many locally made, natural fiber mattresses, at that point it would be taken apart and refilled so long as the fabric cover was in decent shape. The all natural insides would then be recycled to other tasks like mulching plants.

I've been told that the local straw mattresses had their straw filling changed every year. I admit that the old one that was in the house when we bought it got burned as I didn't quite trust that no-one had put insecticide on it and didn't want to find out the hard way.