In the beginning!

In the beginning!  Two people met, fell in love, bought alpacas and started an amazing journey!

I, Nick, grew up just down the road and whilst I always had a great affection for the rural world I was a bit of a “townie”.  Isabel, too was by no means a country girl, growing up in the “small” German city of Wuppertal. As people often do, you travel, you meet new people and occasionally, very occasionally, you meet your soul mate. This happened to us whilst we were both in Thailand. The Boxing Day Tsunami had devastated much of Thailand  had inspire us, separately, and we both ended up there helping to rebuild villages that had been effected by that horrible event.  It was one of my final nights there when our paths crossed and the rest they say is history! We talked, we laughed, we fell in love.

We went back to Europe for a while, then one sunny day, whilst on bended knee I proposed, she said yes of course, and we planned to move to Australia. Like many, we longed for a little piece of land to call our own, grow veggies and fruit trees and maybe even a few chickens. Well we found that little piece of land, just north of Timboon and whilst it was a little larger than we were thinking of, it turned out to be perfect.  Soon after moving out we came across alpacas and thought, why not! Shortly after, 2 boys turned up and the fibre journey began.

Now alpacas get shorn every year and we thought we should turn their fibre into something, well that’s easier said than done. The more we looked, the more determined we became that this was something that Australia was lacking. More investigation and a fair amount of red wine later we decided to pour our life savings into a mill. Now we had no experience, no knowledge, just a belief that we could and should do this.

It wasn’t easy. There wasn’t really a manual. We got some training from the machine manufacturers and the rest was, well, trial and error, swearing, practise, refining, swearing, a little bit more red wine and voila YARN!  (Sounds easy in reflection) Well that was the last 4 1/2 years and we are so proud of what we are doing, creating and how we are creating these gorgeous yarns. We get so excited when people show us what they have created out of our yarns, the sense of achievement that comes from taking an idea and making it reality, that sense that what we do is something special.

If you have ever used our yarns, thank you. If you haven’t jump over to our store and try them and know that these have been made by two very passionate, very determined and very proud people.

Thanks for reading. These blogs are going to become somewhat a journal of how we do things and why we do things. So keep following our story, it isn’t over yet!