Fiber Artist and Hatter
Deb Culig
Deb Culig is a fiber artist creating handmade 100% alpaca western hats at her ranch in a high mountain valley in Tabernash, Colorado, near the Winter Park Ski Resort.
She’s often asked what is the difference between alpaca and traditional beaver or rabbit fur hats…and probably the most important difference is that no animal has to give their life for a hat.
PacaHat’s fleece acquisition methods are totally sustainable and animal-friendly. The fleece is harvested in an annual shearing…much like you getting a hair cut!
All of the fleece used to make ‘PacaHats comes from her own alpaca herd and every hat is a wet-felted, custom work of art.
Gambler Style
Brown with Copper Accents
Blue Denim
Creating wearable art for the world
After 40 years in the advertising, marketing, and graphic design industry, Deb Culig has settled on another creative endeavor… custom hatting.
Always the artist, her creative defiance comes in the form of the methods she uses to build a hat…she doesn’t use traditional materials, she uses 100% alpaca fibers.
And, she doesn’t just employ the typical hatting methods of ordering-in the fur or wool hat body from a big manufacturer only to shape the hat using remade crown molds and flanges; she actually raises the animals, shears the fleece and hand felts it into the material used to make every PacaHat.
Born and raised in a small-town in Nebraska, she moved to Colorado in 1980 to live in the “big city.” Now, years later, she is back to her “rural roots”, living on a 150-acre ranch with her husband Mike and two dogs, raising alpaca, chickens
and producing hay and HATS!
