Alpaca Fleece Duvets are the most environmentally friendly product you can buy. Light-weight, warm, breathable and considered non-allergenic Salem Alpacas Duvets keep you warm in the winter, cool in the summer and look great on your bed year-round.
Salem Alpaca Duvets come in a 100% cotton bag for storage.
Shearing of our alpacas takes place around the middle of May when the weather is more likely to be consistently warm, allowing the alpacas to adjust to not having their full fleece coats.
All fibre colours are mixed together so that when it is processed at the mill it blends into a neutral colour giving us batting that will not show any dark or light spots in the finished product.
Our fibre is then taken to a mini mill to be processed. Here the raw fibre is weighed out into 12 pound lots for hand-washing in an environmentally friendly soap made specifically for natural fibres.
The first machine the fibre goes through is called the picker. This picking process "opens" the fibre to prepare it for further processing. Special conditioners are sometimes added at this point to help with any static that may have built up.
While most fibre goes through a machine called the separator next, the time and care Salem Alpacas takes in sorting and preparing the raw fibre for our duvets results in ours being able to bypass this step.
The carding machine then combs and aligns the fibre onto a rotating drum which forms a "batt". The batts are then weighed out by hand as specified by Salem Alpacas for each of the various size duvets we produce.
Once returned to the farm, the batts are sorted according to the size duvet they will used to make and stored in an environmentally controlled storage area.
ASSEMBLY A layer of 100% cotton fabric is laid out on the production table where the appropriate size batt is then unrolled and spread evenly over the fabric. A second layer of 100% cotton is then laid in place on top of the batt. The three layers are clamped securely in together, keeping everything aligned, and the pinning process begins. Following a six inch grid pattern the duvet is pinned completely in one direction. Then the sewing is done, in the same pattern. This is very time consuming but by following this pattern we can be assured there is no opportunity for the fibre to shift or bunch.
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