Can you give the run down of your weekend visit during the Student Design Retreat in Nashville?
The Design Retreat kicked off with an awards dinner where I got to meet students from design schools all over the country. This competition is broken up into fashion and textile categories. It was great to see the variety of ways people interpreted the project from designing for the home, athletic wear, eveningwear, and sportswear. We also got to meet with alpaca breeders and fiber and yarn manufacturers.
The next day we toured two alpaca farms, a mill that produces exclusively alpaca yarns, and two alpaca yarn retailers.
We also experienced downtown Nashville on a Saturday night, which was a lot of fun. There is live music and great food everywhere you turn!
What did you learn?
Alpacas are adorable and friendly! We had the chance to visit them out in the field at Long Hollow Alpaca farm. The mill was actually located on the farm and we got to see alpaca fiber being processed from raw fiber into the finished yarn. It was really interesting to see this mill as I have only visited larger scale mills in North Carolina. This mill was designed to do small runs of yarn and because of its scale has many great benefits. In some larger mills if they want to change the color of the fiber they are processing it could take a whole day and a whole cleaning crew just to make sure the next batch of fibers does not get contaminated. In this mill they can seamlessly move from one color fiber to the next. It was also great to see that as a designer because of scale the mill could work with you to develop an original line of alpaca yarn.
