Local

February 9, 2016 By Lee 1 Comment

The Button: A Bridge Between Art and Fashion

A year ago, on my first trip to Paris, I spent hours at the Musee de Les Arts Decoratif’s special exhibit “Deboutonner La Monde,” roughly translated “Unbutton Fashion.” This was the first exhibit of a wonderful gift from a collector and it was superbly curated. Aptly, the fashion world noted this wonderful exhibit in many forums. I encourage you to take a moment to view this YouTube Video about the exhibit because it captures the beauty and the content of this amazing show.

Button design and creation was an expansive craft for many decades, with important and successful artisans, painters and sculptors designing unique artisan buttons of their creative works. Buttons carried political and social messages and their design was a noble profession. I loved seeing how designer Elsa Schiaparelli, whose designs were particularly import between World War I and World War II, gave a huge role to the button.

Here at Whispirit, we love to incorporate unique buttons into our simple designs, believing they make an artful statement about color, light and functionality.

We are very fortunate to have a wonderful artisan, Robin Pascal and her handcrafted dichroic glass Perfect Buttons, just a few miles away. Her buttons are often used as the “voila” accent on our one of a kind creations. Take a minute to browse her wonderful button designs. They are perfect to get “closure” on a special project.

We are in the process of designing our spring line…be sure to keep a look out for the buttons…they will be special.

Til next time. Sandy

January 25, 2016 By Lee Leave a Comment

Spring is Just Around the Corner … Really … No Kidding…

It may surprise our friends who are digging out from one of the worst snowstorms to hit the east coast in many moons, but we are already making fabric for Whispirit’s 2016 spring designs. For our lighter weight spring garments we felt spiderweb thin layers of alpaca into silks, cottons and linens which becomes the exterior and the alpaca is the interior. These are examples of earlier Whispirit spring/summer designs:

We are always on the look out for interesting fabrics with unique designs for our spring and summer garments. The process is fun for us. Lee (yes, Lee) and I wander around fabric stores and visit in person or online unique fabric makers. In person is the most fun as we get to visit with very creative and passionate artists. We initially buy small amounts of fabric to test on the FeltLOOM. In order to make the cut, the following “tests” must be passed.

Is It Tough Enough? The first test is whether the fabric can survive the repeated needling with those vicious barbed needles of the FeltLOOM. Numerous fabrics that we initially think would be lovely break or fray from the repeated needling action.

Does It Combine Well with Our Alpaca Colors? This test always surprises us because the color of the alpaca fiber changes the intensity of the colors of our test fabrics. Look at the lovely black and white Indian cotton that Sandy felted with black, white and rose grey. Note how the white becomes subdued by the black fiber. The rose grey brings a warmth to tha fabric by making the black stand out a little more.

Particularly for spring we dye both fabric and fiber. Take a look at these fabric samples we dyed a rich turquoise. Then, to compare, we felted a dyed turquoise fiber to one sample and a natural grey fiber to the other.

Does It Have that Special Drape? A recurrent theme in Whispirit’s fabric designs is the importance of softly draping fabric. Felt is considered by most to be a still, “cardboardesque” fabric not suitable for apparel. By combining the sheerness of our fiber batts with lightly draping fabric, we get the essence of our designs. Drapey fabric is important to our designs. We are trying linen for the first time and we note that it tends to be a little stiff. We learned a couple of things: the alpaca softens the linen’s tension and the fineness of the linen fiber is critical to our results.

Is it Eco Friendly? Starting with this spring line, we are adding a new test and that is how does this fabric impact the environment. This kind of information is very difficult to find out in most textile purchasing arenas we use, including our favorite fabric stores. Yet the processes used in making fashion fabrics is very water and chemical intensive and has a huge amount of waste and excess. In November, we visited with the unique Two Sisters Ecotextiles in Seattle and carried home samples of their amazing linen fabrics. Beautiful. We felted each of these fabrics with white alpaca and wanted to see how they did on the third of our criteria, drape.

What Do Our Friends Like? Last, we take the fabric samples to some of our customers, boutiques and seamstresses for feedback. Send us a note if you would like to have a chance to test and touch any of these trials. We will need to make decisions and start matching these fabrics with designs.

Stay tuned…. Sandy

January 20, 2016 By Lee Leave a Comment

Finding Whispirit’s 2016 Groove

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 will be deepening our focus on eco-friendly textile production.
Our new fabric design which is light and airy.
A “design your own” section of the web store and a gallery featuring our customers creations.

We are excited and hope you will follow us throughout this year.

December 22, 2015 By Lee Leave a Comment

Fleece Navidad

‘Tis a great holiday season. At Whispirit, we have been delighted to provide unique, American made, super warm, and extra cuddly gifts to customers who are gifting in celebration of their special holidays, as well as customers who gifted something special to his or herself. We have especially enjoyed working with those of you who have envisioned a gift for a very special person and helped us to understand how you envisioned the fabric and the design. We learn from each of you.

At Whispering Spirit Alpacas ranch, we additionally have special celebrations during this season. We celebrate the birthdays of our dedicated ranch hand, both of our sons, a very special significant other, and Lee’s mother. Christmas is a holiday in which we both delight, with all of its gaiety, lights, close family and friends and, of course, those wonderful holiday special foods.

We do feel a bit like the elves of our family traditions, working work hard setting up holiday gatherings. Then we come together to cook, to celebrate and to relax with satisfaction. We hope you do, too.

We are so grateful for the many who helped us bring our product to you and wish our seamstresses, fiber mills, alpacas, ranch hand, designers, media specialists, photographers, store clerks, boutiques, alpacas, Great Pyrenees, friends, family, barn cats and rescue dogs for being part of our holiday season. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Festivus and Happy Holidays to all and to all a good rest.

Lee and Sandy

December 15, 2015 By Lee Leave a Comment

Saki, Cisco and their Collaborative “Brown and White Chocolate” Fabric

“How do you make that?” asked the excited purchaser of the lovely Kasode jacket you see pictured. It’s a frequent question.

Laurie Schatzberg said, “Thanks for a fantastic afternoon of shopping, and communing with you all … And those wonderful dogs and alpacas! I’ll be back for sure!” Doesn’t she look great?

First, of course, one white and one brown alpaca had to be sheared. In this case, rich white fleece from Saki and the rich chocolate brown from Cisco. Both are lovely accoyo alpacas.

Second, as with all raw fiber, we skirt it here at the ranch and then ship it to one of the several fiber mills we use. In this case, and because we want a blended fiber and they have proven their creative talent in the past, we ship to Evergreen Fiber Mill, Woodinville, WA, where the all white and all brown fibers are combined into lovely, striated, batts.

Those batts are then returned to us and we needle felt them to a silk scrim. We really enjoy the results of blending these two rich colors together while maintaining the uniqueness of each. As a result of the richness we couldn’t help but call it “Brown and White Chocolate.”

As the Kasode is one of our regular designs, we delivered the fabric to Heather Briggs who did the expert sewing. Sandy then added the beautiful stenciling via materials she obtained this summer at Diane Ericson’s Design Outside the Line retreat in Taos, NM, and ….. Voila!

Another admirer of this jacket has placed an order and that one is just about finished. Happily Saki and Cisco produced enough fleece for several jackets. But not an unlimited supply and the animals won’t be sheared again until May. We already have another jacket in the making so go to the Whispirit Shop and order your own! Special orders are no more expensive. Or order this sweet bag made from the same fabric. We can also make this fabric by the yard for you.

Thanks Saki and Cisco!