Welcome to the podcast for alpaca people!

In this episode, I am in conversation with Lanette Frietag of FeltLOOM.

Lanette has long-term experience of alpacas and other fibre animals, and even owned some of the early imports of alpacas to the US. Before that she had llamas.

How do you scale up your use of fleece to make living, or at least cover the costs of feeding your alpacas? We all face that challenge. Lanette discovered first wet-felting and then needle-felting, by hand. Recognising a machine was needed to scale up, they searched but could not find one, so they developed their own! The FeltLOOM.

I hope you enjoy this episode of how things began for Lanette and why. Also, watch out for a bonus episode coming soon, that will give even more of the backstory.

• FeltLOOM website - description of the machine with pictures and videos
• Punched card - Wikipedia - Some background to punched cards for computing for those who are too young to remember them.

Developer of the FeltLOOM. Involved with early importing of alpacas to the US

Lanette's Facebook page

Lanette's Website

Lanette on YouTube

Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed it.

If you would like to be in touch, please contact me by email - steve@alpacatribe.com - or leave me a voicemail from your browser.

Alpaca Tribe is hosted and produced by Steve Heatherington of Good Podcasting Works, which is part of The Waterside (Swansea) Ltd