Kitt Fraser wins 1st place prize - and an alpaca filled weekend in Nashville!

PhilaU Textile Design graduate student Kitt Fraser won 1st place in the Student Design Competition hosted by the Alpaca Owner and Breeders Association. In addition to this, Kitt was invited to participate in the Student Design Retreat in Nashville for a fun weekend of alpacas, farms, and fibers! I caught up with Kitt to ask her a few questions about her experience there.

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.

Was there anything that surprised you about alpacas and their fibers?

I didn't realize that much of the range in color of the alpaca yarn comes from the actual alpacas. You can of course dye alpaca yarn, but the naturally occurring fiber is so beautiful that many people do not dye it and therefore save a great deal of money and environmental impact. Fun fact: grey alpacas cost more money than any others because they are rare and produce a naturally beautiful colored fiber.

The range in coarseness of alpaca fiber also impressed me. When yarn is labeled as "baby alpaca" it is not from a baby alpaca, just an alpaca that produces very fine fibers. The coarsest alpaca fibers can be used to make rugs.

How has your appreciation for or understanding of alpaca fibers changed after your visit to Nashville?

Participating in this project really gave me an appreciation for alpaca fibers and it was great to meet people who are so passionate about their animals and this industry. As a knit designer the benefits of using alpaca fibers are vast, including the beautiful hand and drape it imparts to your fabric. What the design retreat really solidified in my mind was that fashion and design can become more sustainable and as designers it is our responsibility to advocate for more environmentally friendly products and practices. Using alpaca fibers is an easy choice, as it not only has a luxurious look and feel, but so many environmentally positive benefits. 

GROW your own fabric

Suzanne Lee, a fashion designer, has learned to grow her own fabric using tea, sugar, and microbes. Over the course of a few days in a grow bath, a pale, skin-like fabric is grown on the surface of the mixture. The fabric is dried flat or molded in a three dimensional form.

Suzanne's TED talk:

Solar Handbag by Diffus

Diffus creates a solar handbag

Luxury handbag becomes a portable power station when miniaturized solar cells and embroideries are combined…

With the boom of environmental consciousness, bags with integrated solar cells to charge your mobile phone or laptop have become commonplace. The usual approach of placing flexible thin film solar modules onto messenger type bags, however, has primarily led to products in a outdoor/leisure category. Diffus Design has teamed up with e.g. Swiss embroidery specialist Forster Rohner and Alexandra institute (DK) to challenge this approach.

A handbag that charges your mobile, helps you find your keys and looks amazing! 
In the daytime hours one hundred small solar power stations distributed on The Solar Handbag generate enough electricity to charge a mobile device and a powerful lithium ion battery hidden in a small compartment. At night or in dark surroundings, opening the bag activates optical fibres attached to the inside of the bag that give a diffuse glow and assist in the search for keys, purse or other objects of vital importance.

An aesthetic approach to function
The desire to create a solar energy harvesting surface that offers maximum design freedom while still being highly efficient is the driving force behind The Solar Handbag. Working around existing technologies is not an option: Most textile-based products have limited surface areas available and therefore thin film solar cells have limitations regarding efficiency and aesthetics. The technology behind The Solar Handbag is based on miniaturizing the currently most efficient photovoltaic material, monocrystalline silicon, into oversized sequins and processing them through traditional textile techniques.

The shape of the bag resembles the story between the relationship between the sun and moon – between light source and enlightened. Therefore the shape mimics an eclipse where the moon – the enlightened – interfere or interact with the sun – the light source. The surface is embroidered with an integrated combination of normal embroidery and conductive embroidery that is able to convey the energy harvested for the solar sequins to the rechargeable battery.

Promise of a powerful future
The Solar Handbag illustrates the first development step towards highly efficient, textile based solar cell surfaces. The first generation of solar elements shows an efficiency of 9% when converting solar energy into electrical energy. Overall, the solar elements distributed on The Solar Handbag are able to generate 2 Watts, more than enough energy to charge a mobile device, even at low daily exposure to sunlight. The next generation of solar elements are already promising – the new developments will double the efficiency.