Ken Freivokh – 26 October 2021

Liz’s dad fell in love with border terriers and in 1952 bought Huskie from Wattie Irving, station master at Musselburgh, followed some years later by Jester, sent down to Sussex by train.    Wattie’s son was Ronnie Irving, who bred the famous Dandyhow border terriers, later Chairman of the Kennel Club.

We had to continue the tradition, and border terrier Roofus joined our lives, followed by Shanty, then Tinker, who loved coming to work with me, sharing space with Friday, the senior partner’s black cat at our architectural studio in Hampstead.

But, I digress….   What developed was a deep interest in breeding the border terrier type we preferred.   We started to attend shows and given our design work, set up the Artwork Affix.   We bred a fabulous litter from Kelgram Kashmir at Artwork (Tizzy), a Crufts winner.  We kept Sketch and Doodle, and Sketch (Artwork Fine Line JW) went on to win Best of Breed at LKA Championship Show, and fathered Clipstone Blue Belle by Artwork (Jingle), 1^st Special yearling Bitch at Crufts and 1^st Novice Bitch.  We eventually went back to Scotland for new blood of the type we loved and came back with Dugaden Dilemma at Artwork JW (Sassy), who did amazingly well in the show ring.

I will be reminded that this blog is meant to be about alpacas, and indeed we eventually did buy our first few and, yes, we fell in love with them, and our interest in breeding took a new direction!   We kept the Artwork name and, for the past 12 years, have been trying our best to breed alpacas that not only have wonderful fleeces, but also the phenotype and conformation we prefer.   I have returned to Peru, where I lived for 20 years, and our search eventually took us to the US, where we fell in love with the alpacas bred at Snowmass, in Idaho.  We now enjoy breeding such Snowmass lines to the Peruvian and Australian lines already in UK.

”

“