Artisan Felted Fabrics, Garments
As we wrote in this blog last year, the Fourth of July is Lee’s favorite holiday. Besides celebrating our country’s birthing process it’s that time when he reflects on the year just past. This year we are doing our reflection in pictures. It has been a year of great delight, friendship, health and gratitude. Happy Fourth of July to all of our friends, near and far.
Happy Fourth of July. Celebrate safely and please remember all of our men and women in active service. Sandy
As we have mentioned in our recent blogs, it has been a very cold and windy spring in the East Mountains of New Mexico. Warm days followed by days of freezing cold and a late snow have nipped buds and damaged many of our plants. It has been too windy to even clean out the beds until this weekend.
We started early Saturday morning with bed cleaning and a trip to our local East Mountains nursery, Parker’s Farm Greenhouse. Because of that cold and blustery weather that typifies this elevated terrain, we can’t do our plant shopping in Albuquerque. We need plants that have had their roots started out here where it is routinely 10 to 20 degrees cooler than Albuquerque, only 30 minutes away. It’s like old home week at Parker’s, people greeting each other and owners Monica, Ricky and Andy with warm hugs. We selected good hardy plants — cat-mint, and red & yellow yarrow, — and shuttled them home for planting. The bees, hummingbirds and butterflies love these!
Clearing the beds is always a big job, between tumbleweeds & other debris that blows in during the winter, the dead stalks on the late summer blooms and the fall weeds that didn’t survive the winter (Ha, Ha). We easily fill the truck with debris from our smallest garden, the one that surrounds the portal. It is a location that is first hit by the cold southwest winds! Our Canadian lilac seems to have survived last winter’s winds and is doing pretty well this year. We did lose an established butterfly bush, several penstemons and agastaches. We’ll put some more in when the weather is even warmer and may try a Rose of Sharon. Just like clockwork, a nice warm day and our digging in the dirt seemed to have summoned our resident hummingbirds, ladybugs, bees and Lee found one of the Bull Snakes (or, maybe it found him). Yaa! Spring has finally arrived!!
This is the third house Lee and I have shared and where we have made great gardens together. We started in Houston, where the soils, the rains and constant humidity intimidated us for a couple of years. We learned to get up and gardening before the heat awoke. We had year round glorious blooming azaleas, camelias and splashing fountains. For our three years in Albuquerque, we put in place a lovely xeriscape garden with walking paths and wonderful mixtures of high desert color. Still miss the beautiful rosemary bushes that bloomed year round.
Last evening we sat in the cool of the mountain evening with my sister Patti, looking over our work, the budding plants, our fish pond, our herb gardens, the smells of fresh turned soil and feel satisfied. One garden at a time.
And Salty got his bath, his own way. Life is good.
This weekend one of our sons, Chris, who did his culinary training at Le Cordon Bleu and has worked in fine dining restaurants in NYC, Boston and Girona, Spain explained the subtlety of the wonderful French verb “soigné(e)” to distinguish between fine dining restaurants and excellent restaurants. Fine dining restaurants are staffed, physically designed, and completely orchestrated to create a unique form of excellence in each and every aspect of its service (reservations, welcoming, restaurant decor, plating, delivery, accompanying beverage, check out, attention). Every role in the restaurant — from the individuals plating the food to the cook to the sommelier to the person selecting the ingredients — must perform his or her part with the same commitment to perfection.
Soigné is a word that has also been historically associated with haute couture to describe both a daily style of exquisite dress as well as the highest achievement of design. To Google the term, unfortunately shows that today’s fashion world uses this elegant word to infuse mass produced inexpensive apparel with a sophistication it does not deserve. Oh, where are the word police when we need them? Mass produced, sacrificing quality of materials for less expensive, overseas labor. Yes, you too can buy a trendy dress for $19.99. It is so inexpensive you can buy 6 and next season throw them out and buy 6 more. This, I believe, is a misuse of the word.
Some in the world of fashion who are trying to re-find the sense of excellence in all dimensions — sustainability, fabric, design, quality of production and artisan creations have coined a far less elegant phrase: “Slow Fashion Movement.” I have to fight the image of a chicken cooking in my crock pot, but the Slow Fashion Movement really is another name for the wearable art that has existed in unique shops created intentionally, by design by talented, intentional and yes, slow moving designers. Their’s is not the mass produced wearable which dominated this century as “off the rack” designs. Whispirit is part of this movement.
Each of our garments at Whispirit is created with the very best of creative commitment. Our ingredients are the luxurious natural alpaca fibers … milled by hand into amazing batts … hand felted into unique fabrics … designed to match the qualities of the fabric to your comfort … sewn by hand seamstresses using their highest level of skill … finished with handmade artisan buttons and closures that is artfulness. Each garment is made, one by one for you the ultimate consumer. Soigne!
We, the Whispirit team, work hard to combine artfulness with the highest standards of sustainability, teamwork and production excellence. Each of us bring our best to the effort, combining seemingly unparalleled skills of animal husbandry, shearing standards, milling excellence, textile production, garment creation, button creation, sales and customer service to create a unique personal experience — soigné, slow fashion, that is a memorable fashion experience for you.
Treat yourself to one of our our new creations that will be appearing in our partner boutiques and in our on-line store shortly.
Til next time. Sandy
Our efforts to combine silk and alpaca into sheer fabrics just turned another corner.
Since we began Whispirit, we have felted without water to create our alpaca fabric. We have relied on a mechanized needle felting process to create yards of stable and strong textiles. With this process we have been able to range between more dense outer wear for outdoor winter, which uses 3 layers of alpaca; less dense early spring/fall and lighter”innerweight” fabrics for the warmer spring and air-conditioned summer, using a single thin layer of alpaca. This is a quick look at last year’s inner weight jackets, wraps and other spring and summerweight apparel.
Recently we have been working with techniques of using small amounts of water and soap after needle felting to create even lighter, airy, summer-weight fabric. We experimented with water felting in the washing machine for a handful of scarves and shawls last summer. We found this technique to use too much water and to be too difficult to control or even predict the outcome. Over the last few weeks, we have been trying out a technique recommended by fellow fiber artists and FeltLOOMERs Janice Arnold and Laverne Zabielski for finishing the felting after looming. Laverne even created a video about this simple technique that uses a small amount of soapy water sprayed onto the felted fabric, a technique of rolling the fabric and wrapping it in plastic and then running it in the dryer for a short while.
This technique allows us to leave sections of the underlying silk unexposed, which develops lovely puckers and gathers as the water, silk and natural fibers work together in lovely weaves of texture and color. It is like a felted kaleidoscope.
Off to Puyallup, Washington for the Stitchery and Sewing Expo 2016. If you are there, you will see me wearing one of our new designs. Til next time, Sandy.
All of us at Whispering Spirit Alpacas are concluding a much needed break over the winter holidays which graced us with travels to Spain & France, time with parts of our family and opportunities to ponder ideas for our Whispirit 2016 creations. Traveling gives us a great chance to change our rhythm, take in new vistas, and be inspired by other artisans.
Now returned and as we settle back into running the ranch and designing new garments for Whispirit, we are impressed again by how much creativity and productivity there is in New Mexico, our chosen home and how many new ideas we have bouncing around. New Mexico is where our imaginations and our dreams take shape.
As we collect with our creative partners who help us pull our ideas into Whispirit products, we are excited to take on several new projects, which we will describe in future blogs
We are excited and hope you will follow us throughout this year.
