Mana Meadows Alpaca Farm

Spring 2025

In the spring of 2025, I was given the opportunity to intern alongside Brian and Sharon Heimes, the owners of Mana Meadows, an alpaca farm in Bonner Springs, KS. I was super excited at the opportunity since I had already worked with their animals fleece making yarn at MM Fiber Mill the previous spring and could now experince working with the animals themselves. 

At Mana Meadows, they have around 30 alpaca and make goods out of the yarn made from their fleece. This can be anything from something knit, crochet, felted or woven. As part of the internship I was required to work on a personal project which I chose to do in collaboration with Genopalette, a merino sheep farm in Franklin, MO owned and operated by my uncle, Andy McMurry. We chose to design and make woven scarves out of their merino wool yarn in a huck lace pattern that was inspired by the scarves my grandmother wove for Genopalette. We wove them on Brian's 72in Automatic Compu-Dobby AVL loom which was similar to the loom my grandmother used as well. Since the loom was so wide, we were able to weave five scarves at a time using a leno on the selvage to hold which was new for both me and Brian. In the end, this worked really well and we were able to get 10 scarves done!