Alpaca Fleece in bedding

With skilled manufacturing processes, alpaca fleece is truly a unique fibre with a luxurious and soft handle which is highly suited to bedding applications where "warmth without the weight" is such an important factor in comfort.

To design and manufacture premium quality alpaca quilts however, requires a considerable amount of skill and experience especially in pure alpaca quilts. After five years of testing and carefully refining our production processes together with using only the highest grade of raw materials, we are able to manufacture alpaca bedding to the highest quality levels.

There are two significant problems in processing alpaca fleece with traditional non woven textile technologies as is used in bedding applications.

Alpaca fleece is incredibly soft

Due to its smooth fibre surface alpaca fleece is extremely soft to touch. While this feature creates a luxuriously soft end product, the fibre's smoothness is very difficult to consistently card and prepare for quilting. We have, after years of experience and by skilled adaption of traditional processing systems, learnt how to process pure alpaca to such high standards as is required in the Kelly & Windsor brand.

MicroCombed Alpaca Fleece…the essential dfference

Alpacas originated in the Andes mountains of South America, with their high altitude extremes of warm summers and freezing winter snow and sleet. This resulted in the alpaca's unique 'double fleece' - an inner layer of ultra soft, hollow fibres next to the skin plus a protective outer layer of long 'guard hairs' that are characterised by their high micron thickness and harsh handle not desirable in soft bedding products. The presence of guard hairs is particularly undesirable as they dramatically add weight and reduce the softness of the end product without adding any improvement in thermal efficiency plus are one of the main causes of fibre migration through the fleece cover; particularly when anything less than premium quality outer cover fabrics woven with fine yarns and with high thread count are used.

After shearing, the soft inner fleece and outer guard hairs are intermingled in the alpaca fleece and to make the highest quality bedding it is important that the guard hairs be separated and removed from the soft inner fleece. The efficient separation of guard hairs is very difficult with traditional textile carding systems and has in the past been considered impractical and therefore not done by other manufacturers, resulting in low quality and potentially defective alpaca products being sold to consumers.

Kelly & Windsor use an exclusive proprietary MicroCombed carding system that mechanically separates and removes alpaca guard hairs in stages to create the finest alpaca fleece in relation to softness, warmth and lightness which ensures that all Kelly & Windsor alpaca quilts, underblankets and pillows are of only the highest quality.

MicroCombed alpaca fleece - the essential difference in Kelly & Windsor's alpaca bedding products.