More than once the alpaca farmer has cast his mind back to his engineering days with Qantas ground staff, doing orderly inspections through parts, to help diagnose a problem with a woollen garment, un-picking it and fixing the fault.

Mr Banhidi and his wife Betty, a former hairdresser, knew little about alpacas when they began rearing their own animals for fibre on a small farm near Berry more than 20 years ago. They soon relocated to a higher altitude near Goulburn after the South Coast's humidity killed some alpacas.

Inferior Chilean products were about the only alpaca garments available in Australia at the time, so they purchased a Swiss knitting machine to make their own, which they sell at the Old Bus Depot Markets in Kingston.

"At one stage we tried a [spinning] place in Geelong, they did not do a good twist to the yarn. When we knitted it, customers were coming back saying this is peeling apart, there was not enough twist in the yarn," Mr Banhidi said.

"We hugely burnt our fingers, probably a $2000 loss there, and our name, we have been coming here for 20 years and our name was tarnished because of that. I said from now on we will not do it in this country, because for small [operators] like us, that was a huge loss," Mr Banhidi said.

Fibre goes across Tasman and back again

They send their fibre to New Zealand from where it is returned as spun-up yarn. Rising at 4am and driving from Goulburn to set up each Sunday morning at the market in Kingston, their turnover picked up in the colder months, but has dwindled lately to a point where Mr Banhidi, 76, and Mrs Banhidi, 73, are selling up everything.

"The beauty of it is when we retired, so many things surfaced, what hidden talent we had, from designing our business cards, promotional cards and all that sort of thing, it is almost a journey of discovery of what has been hidden for all those years when we were employed by someone else," Mr Banhidi said.

They learned everything, from showing a reserve champion to shearing.

Mr Banhidi knits each garment. Mrs Banhidi sews the pieces together. Their garments are not cheap, although they tried to keep them under $250. He was approached to make a special skirt, top and little cadigan with petite rosettes for a woman's wedding outfit. At their peak they were coming to Kingston for five months or more a year, resuming after a summer break at Easter. Many of their clothing items were brought for gifts for friends and family abroad.