After sleeping on my mattress for a few nights on and off, I’m disappointed to report that it gives me allergies ): I know for sure that it’s not because it’s made of wool. My pillow is also stuffed with wool, and I’ve never had trouble with it. Instead, the problem seems to be the quality of the wool…
The wool is incredibly low quality. It was repurposed from a The Futon Shop futon mattress, similar to this one (although I seriously wonder if it was ever actually 8″ thick). I got it for free on Craigslist.
The first problem I noticed with the free mattress was the fact that it spewed dust when disturbed. I thought it was dead skin from the previous owner, but even washing the wool in the washing machine didn’t fix this problem.
Fluffing the wool before stuffing my mattress revealed even more problems. What I thought was dust was mostly composed of broken wool hairs. There are too many of them to get out by washing. The wool has shredded plastic (looks like plastic bags got sucked into the carding machine) and dental floss-esque plastic strings mixed in, not to mention the vegetable matter. I can feel it poking through the mattress casing >:
Needless to say, I wouldn’t buy a new product from The Futon Shop.
I thought that the mattress casing fabric would be thick enough to keep all the dust and hairs inside, but… I guess not. So I’ve been brainstorming ways to fix this! The easiest option would be to make a dust cover, but I’m not sure what type of fabric would be necessary. The other, labor-intensive option would be to get new wool and restuff the mattress. Fortunately, I know where I would buy wool from, so it wouldn’t be a huge deal to do that. Any other ideas for how to fix the mattress?
Fortunately, the mattress seems comfortable enough. It definitely has a different feel than other mattresses I’ve slept on. Although the stuffing is homogeneous, it feels like there’s a fluffy top layer, almost like a mattress topper, over a hard core. It’s too firm to just call it “firm”.
If I do restuff the mattress, I’ll plan on making it thinner. It is currently 4″ thick, which is more than enough.