Sweating bullets over baby wool in a Portland heatwave

Marcus
2026-03-16T04:00:56+01:00

It was mid-July, the Nanit camera was flashing a menacing red 81 degrees, and our 1924 Portland craftsman was doing its best impression of a pizza oven. I was frantically trying to program a portable AC unit with one hand while bouncing an extremely fussy, damp eleven-week-old in the other. That's exactly when my wife, Sarah, walked into the nursery holding what looked like a heavy winter sweater.

"Put him in this," she said, tossing a wool sleep sack over the railing of the crib.

I stared at her. I stared at the wool. I touched it. It was definitely wool. Are we trying to roast him? I asked, calculating the thermal mass of sheep hair combined with an eighty-degree room. As a software engineer, I live and die by logic, and putting a baby in winter gear during a heatwave seemed like a catastrophic system failure.

Sarah just sighed, told me to look it up, and went to make coffee. That single command sent me down a three-hour, 3:00 AM Reddit and medical journal rabbit hole that completely rewrote my understanding of textiles, infant temperature regulation, and sheep.

Debugging the overheating panic

If you're a first-time parent, you already know the terrifying baseline anxiety of infant sleep. At our two-month checkup, our pediatrician casually mentioned that overheating is a massive risk factor for SIDS. He said babies lose body heat up to four times faster than adults but are also terrible at sweating, which means they can't control their own internal thermostats yet.

Naturally, this information ruined my life for six straight weeks. I had been dressing our son in these cheap, synthetic fleece zip-ups we got at the baby shower. I thought fleece meant "cozy." I didn't realize polyester fleece is basically spun plastic. Every time he woke up, the back of his neck felt like a swamp. He was clammy, cranky, and covered in tiny red heat bumps.

When I started aggressively Googling sheep fiber that night, I realized I was confusing "legacy wool" with the modern stuff. The itchy sweaters your grandma knitted you're made from broad, coarse fibers that are roughly 40 microns thick. They poke your skin. They trap heavy heat.

But the wool sourced from specific mountain sheep is apparently an entirely different operating system. We're talking under 20 microns thick—often around 18.5. It's so fine that the fibers literally bend when they touch human skin instead of poking it. More importantly, it is biological active cooling.

The Cambridge study that blew my mind

I don't trust baby blogs, but I do trust raw data. While frantically trying to prove my wife wrong, I stumbled across a study from Cambridge University involving premature babies in the NICU. I'm probably butchering the exact medical phrasing, but apparently, the preemies who slept on this fine wool gained an extra 10 grams of weight per day compared to the babies in regular hospital cotton.

Why? Because regulating temperature burns a massive amount of caloric energy. When the babies were in standard fabrics, their tiny bodies were working overtime just trying to stay warm or cool down. The wool acted like a smart-thermostat, trapping heat when the incubator dipped, and venting heat when it spiked. Because the babies didn't have to work to maintain their temperature, they just slept deeper and used those calories to grow.

It supposedly absorbs up to 30% of its dry weight in moisture before it even feels damp. If the baby sweats, the fabric pulls the moisture away and evaporates it into the air, completely bypassing that terrifying clammy phase that leads to rapid cooling.

Running the overnight beta test

Armed with this theoretical knowledge, I still wasn't entirely convinced it would work in our stifling house. But the synthetic fleece was clearly a disaster, so I decided to run a test.

To establish a controlled baseline, I dressed him in our favorite Long Sleeve Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit as his base layer. If I'm being honest, this bodysuit is the only piece of clothing we own that actually survives his diaper blowouts. It's got this 5% elastane stretch that lets me peel it down over his shoulders instead of dragging a biohazard over his head. Plus, the organic cotton is incredibly breathable, so I figured if the wool sack turned out to be a mistake, at least his base layer wasn't suffocating him.

I zipped him into the wool sack over the bodysuit. He looked like a very cozy, slightly confused caterpillar.

I spent the next three hours staring unblinkingly at the temperature graph on the baby monitor app. Every twenty minutes, I'd sneak into the room like a ninja and put two fingers on the back of his neck.

Hour one: Dry.
Hour two: Perfectly warm, but not sweaty.
Hour three: He was deeply asleep, and I was the only one sweating.

It defied all logic. The room was 78 degrees by that point, yet his skin felt exactly like it did when the room was 68 degrees. It was sorcery. Or, you know, millions of years of mammalian evolution.

The eczema patch side quest

An unexpected feature of this whole textile experiment was what happened to his skin. For his first two months, our son had this angry, dry, red patch of eczema right under his chin where his drool pooled into his neck rolls.

Our doctor suggested it was partly a friction issue combined with trapped moisture. Because we ditched the plastic-based fleece and switched exclusively to the breathable cotton base layer and the wool sack, the microclimate around his neck completely changed. The fine wool fibers have some sort of natural waxy coating—I think it's called lanolin—that naturally repels liquids. Instead of his spit-up soaking into his collar and festering against his skin all night, the moisture wicked away.

Within a week, the angry red patch was just normal, soft baby skin again. I'm not saying it's a medical miracle, but upgrading his sleepwear firmware definitely fixed the bug.

If you're curious about upgrading your own kid's base layers, poking around Kianao's organic cotton collection is a good place to start before you dive into the deep end of technical fibers.

The laundry disaster of week four

Of course, nothing in parenting comes without a massive hidden catch, and for this wonder-fabric, the catch is laundry.

Because the material is naturally antimicrobial, it genuinely doesn't hold smells. A baby can aggressively spit up on it, and once it dries, it just smells like nothing. We went three weeks without washing the sleep sack. I just hung it over the crib rail every morning to air out.

But eventually, a diaper situation occurred that demanded an emergency wash. Sleep-deprived and panicking, I threw it into the machine with our standard heavy-duty detergent on a warm cycle.

Don't do this.

Standard laundry detergents are packed with enzymes designed to break down protein stains like food and blood. Well, guess what animal hair is made of? Protein. I pulled the sleep sack out of the wash, and it looked like it had been attacked by moths. Tiny holes everywhere. The enzymes literally ate the fabric.

You have to use a specific, enzyme-free wool wash on a cold, delicate cycle. Now, when his one surviving sleep sack is taking 24 hours to air dry (you can't put it in the dryer unless you want it to fit a Barbie doll), we've to use backups.

For daytime stroller naps while the wool is drying, we've been using the Organic Cotton Baby Blanket with Squirrel Print. It's generously sized, and because it's double-layered organic cotton, it does a pretty decent job of keeping him comfortable in the breeze. It doesn't have the magical active-temperature-control of the mountain sheep stuff, but it's completely chemical-free and looks fantastic in photos, which makes my wife happy.

Actually, our living room is currently cluttered with drying racks. I frequently just drape the damp wool sack over the wooden A-frame of his Panda Play Gym to dry near the window. Honestly, the play gym is just okay as an actual toy—he'll stare at the little crocheted panda for exactly four minutes before aggressively trying to eat the wooden leg—but it makes a surprisingly excellent makeshift drying rack for my expensive baby laundry.

The sustainability specs (for my fellow nerds)

Once I became deeply invested in my son's thermal output, I started looking into how this stuff is actually made. If you're going to spend the money on premium natural textiles, you run into a bunch of certification acronyms.

Apparently, you want to look for things like Woolmark and RWS (Responsible Wool Standard). RWS just means the sheep aren't subjected to weird, cruel agricultural practices (like mulesing) and that the land they graze on is managed properly. Since sheep grow this stuff continuously and only need a haircut once or twice a year, it's basically a totally renewable resource that biodegrades.

Contrast that with the synthetic polyester sacks that take 400 years to break down in a landfill while shedding microplastics into the washing machine. It makes the slightly annoying enzyme-free laundry routine feel a bit more justifiable.

Final system check

We're now entering our first real winter with an 11-month-old, and we're still using the exact same type of sleep sack we used in that July heatwave. We just layer thicker pajamas underneath it. The fact that I don't have to calculate "TOG ratings" or swap out blankets every time the weather shifts has freed up a tiny sliver of my brain processing power.

If you're still zipping your kid into plastic fleece and wondering why they wake up screaming at 2 AM with a sweaty neck, tossing the synthetics and trying out highly breathable natural fibers might be the easiest troubleshooting step you ever take.

Ready to build a better sleep environment for your little one? Check out Kianao's collection of breathable, organic baby essentials and stop guessing about temperature.

My incredibly messy FAQ about infant fibers

Does the wool honestly shrink if you wash it wrong?

Oh, absolutely. I shrunk a $100 base layer down to a size that would comfortably fit a squirrel. If you accidentally throw it in the dryer on high heat, the heat and friction cause the tiny scales on the fibers to lock together. It's permanent. Wash on cold, air dry flat. Treat it like fragile legacy code.

Is it itchy on a newborn's bare skin?

Not if you get the right kind. I was terrified of this because my skin breaks out just looking at a thrift store sweater. But baby-grade mountain sheep fibers are so incredibly thin (look for anything under 20 microns if you're a data nerd like me) that it feels smoother than heavy cotton. We still usually put a light organic cotton bodysuit underneath just to protect the expensive wool from diaper blowouts, though.

Can they really wear it in the summer?

Yeah, which still breaks my brain. Our pediatrician explained that because babies can't sweat efficiently, they need a fabric that pulls humidity away from their skin. A lightweight, low-GSM (grams per square meter) version acts more like high-end athletic wicking gear than a winter coat. We used it in 80-degree rooms, and he was dry as a bone.

How do I get the spit-up smell out without strong detergent?

The weirdest part of this whole experience is that it genuinely doesn't hold odors. The fibers have a natural protein coating that repels bacteria. Most of the time, I just wipe the spit-up off with a damp cloth and let it dry over the crib rail. When it really needs a wash, a gentle, baby-safe wool wash works fine. Just avoid the heavy-duty enzyme cleaners.

Is it worth the money compared to cotton?

I view it like buying a really good mattress. Yes, the upfront cost makes you wince. But because it controls temperature across such a wide range, you don't need to buy three different thicknesses of sleep sacks for different seasons. One good universal-weight sack lasts practically all year until they outgrow the length. Plus, the peace of mind knowing my kid isn't overheating while I sleep is worth whatever the price tag says.