Orenburg Downy Shawl

The goats of the Orenburg steppe grow an undercoat unusually fine and long because of the extreme continental climate there - hard winters and hot summers - and attempts to move the breed elsewhere have produced coarser down, which is why the craft stayed local. Women have combed, spun and knitted it since the eighteenth century. Two products come out of it: the thick grey or white everyday shawl, warm and dense, and the pautinka or cobweb, a lace shawl knitted on very fine needles in openwork patterns, so light that a full-size square weighs under a hundred grams. The two tests people apply to a good pautinka are whether it passes through a wedding ring and whether it fits inside a goose egg. It takes weeks to knit one. The city has a museum and a factory, but much is still made at home and sold in the market, where quality and honesty about the fibre content both vary.

What you actually see

• The cobweb shawl - lace so fine a full square weighs under a hundred grams.
• The ring test - the shawl drawn through a wedding ring to show its fineness.
• The steppe goats - a local breed whose down coarsens if moved elsewhere.
• The home knitters - much of the production still done by hand at home.

When to go

All year. One to two hours for the museum and the market. Winter is when the shawls make sense.

Honest expectations

Market shawls are often blended with synthetic yarn and sold as pure down; the difference in warmth and price is large and hard for a visitor to judge. The factory shop is safer. Orenburg is remote, near the Kazakh border, and summers are very hot.

Nearby

The Ural river runs through the city, with a bridge marked as the Europe and Asia boundary.