My Alpaca: The Quilters of Krosno

A cousin's alpacas, a few sacks of fleece and a guild running out of masters. In south-east Poland, My Alpaca has been sewing duvets by hand for a decade, and rescuing a trade along the way.

A cousin's alpacas, sacks of fleece and a guild running out of masters: how My Alpaca revived Polish hand-quilting, one numbered alpaca duvet at a time.

The fleece had been sitting in sacks for several seasons. Marcin, who kept a small hobby herd of alpacas near Krosno in south-east Poland, had sheared them faithfully and stored the results with no particular plan. In 2014 his cousin, Magdalena Kot-Kyriazis, newly stepped away from twenty years in corporate marketing, supplied one. A prototype duvet was made, she slept under it, and My Alpaca followed.

What came next was closer to detective work. To make a duvet worthy of the fleece, Kot-Kyriazis went looking for the people who once quilted them by hand and found a trade on the point of vanishing. In Kraków, quilt-making had belonged to the linen crafts of the tailors' guild since 1380; by the late 1960s cheap machine-made duvets had emptied the workshops, and by the time she came calling no master's examinations had been held for years. My Alpaca's answer was to recruit a team of skilled local women and have them trained by one of the last master quilters still working. It also tracked down and restored a historic carding machine, and built its quilting frames to the old patterns.

The process is unhurried by design. The alpacas are shorn once a year, in May, each giving around three kilos of fibre, roughly enough for two double duvets. The fleece is cleaned by hand on large sieves, washed gently, then fed through the old carding machine, whose hundreds of fine needles comb it into a cloud several centimetres deep. That cloud is laid between two casings of densely woven cotton, or cotton and bamboo, the quilting pattern is traced on top, and the whole is stitched by hand so the filling stays precisely where it was put. The largest quilts take up to 25 hours. Each carries its own number, so the workshop can tell you who made it and when.

Why alpaca? The fibre, reserved for the Inca nobility long before anyone thought of putting it in a bed, breathes, regulates temperature and is kind to sensitive skin. Nothing is wasted: fleece too short or too dark for bedding becomes dog beds and cushions. Fibre now comes from European breeders as well as the original herd, and the range has grown from one all-seasons duvet and one pillow to summer and winter weights, alpaca and silk pillows, linen and percale bedding, baby alpaca throws and travel sets, all made to order, a single duvet in an awkward size included.

My Alpaca allows itself a little whimsy, too. For the brand's tenth birthday the Swedish pattern designer Bärbel Dressler redrew an eighteenth-century toile de jouy so that alpacas graze through its pastoral scenes, printed in a shade of fondant pink. It is the sort of joke that only lands when the craft beneath it is entirely serious.

More than 10,000 duvets and pillows later, My Alpaca sends its work to over 20 markets, to hotels as well as homes. The quieter achievement belongs to the quilters: a trade that was closing its doors in Poland has a new generation at the frame.

Discover more at My Alpaca.

Craftsman feeding alpaca fleece through a historic carding machine at MyAlpaca, Krosno | The Aficionados

Hands smoothing a layer of carded alpaca fleece by hand before quilting | The Aficionados

Hand lifting the label of a MyAlpaca hand-quilted alpaca duvet with patterned piping | The Aficionados