Series 1: The Cushion Pad Story
Alison and Iain at the British Alpaca Society (BAS) National Show in 2017
This is the story of how tailoring and my craftiness started a weird and wonderful journey of fibre discovery that eventually led to the cushion pads I’ve chosen for Series 1. If you just want to know why I think the cushion pads are great, skip to this linked post ;)
My partner Iain and I have always loved natural fabrics and fibres and spending time daily choosing them with our tailoring clients for their clothing is one of the best parts of the job. I’ve always been a craft lover and have knitted a few simple things. It was at a knitting show in London that I discovered and fell a bit in love with alpaca yarn at a stand for Toft Alpaca.
Alpaca are llama relatives that originated in South America and were domesticated by the Incas, becoming central to their economy. They’re smaller than llamas and their fleeces grow in a range of 22 natural colours. The teddy-bear cuteness of the huacaya (wah-cai-yah) and spiral-locked suri alpaca breeds produce a most prized fleece on their bodies which is shorn yearly.
Alpacas are kept as fibre animals in a similar way to sheep being farmed for their wool though the two fleeces are technically very different. That first ball of alpaca knitting yarn purchased from Toft at the fair had me hooked once I’d knitted it up into a simple hat I still wear today. I couldn’t believe such a soft and luxurious-feeling material similar to cashmere could come from an animal in the UK.
Most normal people might be content to keep seeking new yarn made from UK alpaca for their knitting projects and leave things there but not Iain and I, oh no…
There followed over the space of a couple of years a bit of an alpaca obsession whereby we visited UK farms and shows, learnt about alpaca fibre assessment and husbandry on courses and even how to shear them. We learnt a lot, though the fact we lived in a flat in London with no garden, let alone any land in the country to our names, remained a small fly in the ointment. We thoroughly enjoyed marrying our professional fine-fabric-fondling skills with learning how we might one day be able to create our very own UK alpaca cloth through breeding characterful alpacas, even if this turned out to be a bit of a fantasy. In this process we met some fantastic people and gained a bit of a reputation on the scene as a pair of alpaca-educated-non-alpaca-owning-weirdos.
I nearly fell off my chair when we received a call on behalf of BAS in 2017 inviting me and Iain to be Fibre Zone judges at the British Alpaca National Show that year. Realising our skills and learning put us in a fairly unique position of bringing something helpful to this we said yes even if we didn’t feel super-confident at the time. We hoped we could bring a new angle as relative outsiders and help focus competition entrants on commercial outcomes as well as crafty ones. So between 2017 and 2019 Iain and I awarded rosettes and certificates to the talented makers of things made of alpaca entered into the BAS National Show Fibre Zone. Categories ranged from yarn and soft toys to garments and saleable ideas.
One of the sponsors of the Fibre Zone, Penrose, a company making luxury bedding and soft furnishings from alpaca fibre run by Den and Paul Whittey, sponsored the prize for product with most commercial potential. With this prize Paul hoped to encourage the alpaca owners of the UK to truly focus their attention on the outcome for the fibre of their animals and not solely on their breeding programmes. Penrose have done a fantastic job themselves of using alpaca fibre in the pursuit of better sleep for their customers and it was them that sprang to mind when I researched how to fill my Series 1 cushions in an ethical way. More on these fab cushion pads in another post…
In our roles as Fibre Zone judges we really enjoyed seeing all the skill and effort gone into showcasing the beauty of the fibre and were particularly thrilled at items that really expressed the uniqueness of the alpaca fibre as a material of great softness, natural colour variety and subtle sheen. The alpaca-owning obsession for us has taken a back seat for now but who knows what the future holds.