It was time to accelerate our long range farm plan and get the fiber business going. With 20 acres and a growing herd of alpacas, the plan was to develop fabric from our fiber. The fabric would be marketed to people who sew. I’ve sewn all my life and I wanted something to cut up and sew with wild abandon. Soon I realized that anything I produced by shearing, spinning and weaving into fabric would be framed and hung in dedication to the fourteen billion hours it took to produce that little treasure. There would be no wild cutting on it!

So spinning and weaving were set aside and I discovered felting. The world stopped and for the next year I focused on developing a way to make multiple yards of felted alpaca fabric fine enough to compete with woven fabric. In selecting equipment to turn this into a production operation, I purchased a Pat Green Supercarder. This is the top of the line drum carder for hobby fiber artists. It produced a perfect batt for felting. The key to good felt is the batt and the batt is all the loose fiber brushed into a fluffy blanket. It looks exactly like the stuffing inside a quilt. I spent hours carding fiber into perfect batts. With 15 batts all lined up, I made 4 yards of fabric out of 2 pounds of fiber. It didn’t take long to realize that hobby equipment was not going to produce the volume I needed. My first large, outside order came and I figured it would take me eight days just to card the fiber. Instead, I sent it off to a processing mill to have it carded. Unfortunately, it returned in unusable condition. The batts were uneven and ragged. I had to recard all of it.

I talked to several mills looking for a way to get quality batts from the cottage industry size equipment. I talked to Paula Simmons, who is with Pat Green, (a designer and builder of carders) about their cottage industry size carders. I came to the conclusion that this equipment was ideal for spinning, not felting. And that applied to every brand of carder on earth. All three of them. A carder is not your typical household appliance. Paula even offered to sell me her pride and joy, a carder that had been shipped over from England years ago. It had been her "cottage industry carder" when she was writing the books for the rest of us! Paula Simmons is an icon in the fiber world. I was honored to be offered her personal carder. As luck would have it, the carder resided half an hour away at her former residence. I was disappointed to realize, this machine was not going to work for me either. It was beautiful. It was huge. So huge that when Paula left, the machine stayed. It was the type of machine that would bring an equipment junkie to their knees. You should have seen my husband. We’re talking about twelve feet of steel, driven by real leather belts and the gears and rollers, oh yeah, it was an equipment junkies dream! My husband seriously considered buying it just so he could "have it."

While I pondered a way to modify the equipment to work for me I thought, "Darn, if I could just get a bigger Supercarder . . . " The idea just hung out there for a while. I wondered if the man Paula referred to as a genius would get annoyed when people asked him to modify his design. Or possibly he was like me. Would he consider building me a bigger Supercarder? I decided I shouldn’t put this off. I picked up the phone and called Paula. I had never actually met Paula, as they live about four hours north of us. But by this time we had talked on the phone several times and were pretty friendly. I tentatively asked about the possibility, if they weren’t too busy, of building me a special carder. She seemed to think the idea was worth entertaining. The next thing I knew, I was speaking with the genius himself. Pat Green is from England and I quickly recognized the accent and the sense of humor. We talked for quite a while, often with Paula on the line too. I explained how I used the Supercarder and asked if it was possible to make a double wide Supercarder. They discussed what frames could be modified to accommodate the double width. Eventually, Pat asked if I could have whatever size I wanted, what would it be? I figured a batt about 18 inches wide by 50 inches long would be perfect. I’m not tall enough to work with anything longer than that and there is no need to be greedy. He said he would think about that and get back to me. I dared to hope! What he was considering would not just be a double wide Supercarder. This would be a whole new animal. He said it was going to cost me. I had told him my budget and it was fairly modest.

I got a call back from Paula a day or so later, with a plan and price. Pretty soon the three of us were all on the phone again fine tuning the design. Pat carefully explained that this would not look like the machine I currently had. Those are very refined pieces of equipment that have been in production for many years. The machine that I was getting was going to be a Prototype. I understood completely. This was not my first experience ordering equipment or building it for that matter. And the price was just a little higher than my most optimistic hope. If I sold my beloved Supercarder, I could pull it off. After all, I did have another small, hand cranked carder. This would be my third Pat Green carder.

They told me it would be a couple of months before it was done. They were really busy. I crossed my fingers and waited. The last time I had purchased equipment built to order, it had taken almost a year to get. It was from another manufacturer but the experience had jaded my enthusiasm for such promises.

Six weeks later I got the call. The carder was done. All I had to do was drive across the border into Canada and get it. I was pretty excited. I got the directions and maps, we hooked up the trailer and headed off.

It was early Spring. We hadn’t mowed our grass yet, let alone started a garden. I knew that Paula was a gardener from our conversations. Before I was an alpaca farmer, I had a huge perennial garden. As soon as we drove into their place I was in awe. Paula said they grow everything they eat. I looked around and imagined three hundred people could easily live off of their garden. I won’t bore you with endless ravings about their garden. But if you had to come back in the next life as one of Pat Greens’ apple trees, you would be treated to a privileged life.

Pat wandered out and directed us to the shop. One of my first jobs was in a machine shop so the equipment was very familiar. I noted as we worked our way through that this was a very nice shop. My husband was behind me so I couldn’t see his face. I knew he had to be light headed with shop envy right about now. Pat said "There it is . . . " and waved to a mammoth size drum carder with a pedestal in front of it. I was shocked! I was expecting a prototype. This was not a prototype. I realized the pedestal was for me to stand on. As I stepped up to the carder, I felt like I was stepping up to a baby grand piano. I had the urge to wash my hands before I touched it in case I got smudgy finger prints on it! I had my own bag of fiber from home so I turned it on and started feeding it in. It was perfect. The batt was perfect. And by my estimation it was going to cut my carding time to about 1/10^th what it was. I was back in business!

We spent time visiting with Paula and Pat. By the time we left I was convinced Paula was right, he is a genius. My hunch is they both are. They asked me what I thought the carder should be named. I didn’t know. I don’t even name my own car. I have enough trouble keeping up a list of possible names for alpacas. I thought she was kidding when she said they were going to name it the Elsacard. I didn’t give it much thought.

I spent the next week in carding bliss. Then I posted a report on the felters’ forum about my perfect carder. I knew that anyone interested in felting would want to hear about this. I was flooded with questions about the machine. They have since sold several more Elsacards. Occasionally, someone I know will mention seeing an ad for the Elsacard or finding it on line. At first I was a little self conscious about being immortalized in machinery. But now I have a little fantasy that someday, when I am in my eighties, and Pat Green and Paula Simmons are long gone, some young felter, a bit of an equipment junkie, will come across an Elsacard and say "Boy, I wish I could get my hands on a carder like that!"