The Independent Stitch

Shetland: A new resource for vintage knitting designs

My interest in Shetland textiles focuses on the sheep and their wool, in large part because that’s what I love. As I travel this particular road, I’m grateful for the gifted researchers and designers who pay attention to traditional and contemporary Shetland textiles. Among these people is Susan Crawford, whose previous four books have delved into knitting from the 1920s through the 1950s. For the past four years, Susan has traveled to Shetland twice a year (lucky!) to spend time selecting twenty-five tantalizing knitted pieces from the collection of the Shetland Museum and Archives, examining every stitch, and designing patterns that will allow contemporary knitters to be guided by the works' creators in making reproductions of the pieces or simply being inspired by them.

I’ve seen in person some of the works Susan has selected. I look forward to viewing them through her eyes as well, since she’s had the opportunity to study them in far more detail than I have.

This stunning vest, for example—when I discovered it in the museum on my second trip there, I didn’t want to quit looking at it:

It’s a long way to go to visit a garment, but the experience was memorable—and soon we’ll be able to get a close look without so much travel, because Susan’s Vintage Shetland Project is in the process of being funded through Pubslush. As I’m writing this, the project has gathered £19,998 with a goal of £12,000. I’m not surprised that it’s already exceeded its goal. Susan has a reputation for doing exquisite work. All of her previous books have been self-published, so we know how well she will pull this one off. We also only have to wait until November to see the book published.

You can hear Susan talk about the project on the Pubslush page, and get glimpses of a number of the garments that she has gotten to know so well. I’m including a few of my favorites here. I’m seriously wishing a trip to Shetland was in my schedule for this year (so many fine people; so many great ideas), but I’m still processing the piles of information I collected there last fall. . . .

It was hard for Susan to choose from the many garments in the museum, and it's hard for me to choose what to feature from the twenty-five she has selected. But here are a couple of them:

The breathtaking delicacy of that lace! Wouldn't it be lovely to wear?

There's a strong Scandinavian influence in Shetland, and it shows up in the knitting, with a shift in flavors.

And this cardigan ranks as a favorite for many reasons. Obviously both beautiful and well loved, it deserves to be reincarnated on 21st century needles and given more chances to bring joy into people's lives.

Go check out the Pubslush page, and also there’s a blog tour going on. Here’s what’s happened to date, if you want to see more pictures of cool stuff:

KnitBritish

Tasha By Gum By Golly

Hazel Tindall

Ella Gordon

Jess James

Jen Arnall-Culliford

Maja Karrlson

Karie Westermann

Rachel Atkinson

Coming soon:

Julia Billings - tomorrow

Helen Magnusson

Tom Van Deijnen

Kate Atherley

Jamieson & Smith

Donna Druchunas

Felicity Ford

Ysolda

Donna Smith (check out her post on Carol Christiansen’s taatit rugs study and the exhibition, too)

Susan Crawford

(Cruise around these blogs: it took me a while to write this post because I kept finding interesting things to read.)

For those of us who like yarn for its own sake, Susan has been collaborating with some mills to develop yarns suited to knitting vintage-style pieces—exciting!

___

And, by the way, one reason that it’s been so quiet around here is that I’ve been learning WordPress and moving my blog and site to that platform. There are only so many hours in a day, and I’ll be glad to get back to writing instead of learning software. Nonetheless, it’s a good move and very soon you’ll be finding me at The Independent Stitch.

Happy reading, knitting, and spinning to you. . . .

Lithuanian knitting: unusual and approachable continuing traditions

Years ago, when I edited Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot, I learned of Lithuanian textiles through weaving, by way of work by Antanas and Anastazija Tamošaitis and by Kati Meek and an awareness of the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture in Chicago (SS&D Summer 1986). Lithuania is one of three countries tucked into the curve at the eastern end of the Baltic Sea, along with Latvia and Estonia.

Later I met and published several books by Donna Druchunas, who has delved deeply into her Lithuanian roots with a special interest in the knitting heritage. Donna included some Lithuanian material in her Ethnic Knitting Exploration, for which I knitted the samples as part of the design and publishing process. Donna's dedication and rigor make her a great working partner.

Knowing Donna led to my meeting June Hall, who lives in Cumbria, in northwestern England, with a flock of Soay sheep and has been my generous guide and connection to that part of the world. June, too, digs long and hard into the subjects that catch her intellect and interest.

They both have studied the Lithuanian language, traveled to Lithuania, and now (over more than eight years) collaborated on a book: Lithuanian Knitting: Continuing Traditions.

 

It’s a great honor to host Donna here with a blog post celebrating the imminent publication of Donna’s and June’s book on Lithuanian knitting (and sheep and wool). She’s written us a splendidly technical introduction to how she came to know some of the techniques in the book—and notes as well that you can knit the book’s projects with the techniques that are already familiar to you. It’s just interesting, and possibly useful, to know exactly what methods Lithuanians use to make their stitches dance.

— Deb

P.S. I’ll be back with more blog posts before long. My time for writing posts has been consumed by other pressing needs, but it looks like some of those will soon be resolved.

_____

Guest post by Donna Druchunas

What is Lithuanian knitting?

What makes knitting Lithuanian? Is it special techniques that are used? A unique way to hold the yarn and needles? Certain combinations of colors? Interesting pattern stitches?

All of these things, and more. The techniques I’ve included in Lithuanian Knitting: Continuing Traditions are all based on vintage accessories in museum collections, reproductions of Lithuanian National Costume ensembles, or folk art pieces made by contemporary knitters. These instructions are adapted from Mezgimas (Knitting) by Anastazija Tamošaitis as well as other vintage and contemporary Lithuanian knitting books in my library, along with tips I’ve picked up from Lithuanian friends. I’ve modernized some of the decreases and made other adjustments to make the techniques easier for contemporary knitters.

I love vintage knitting books and have my own small collection of nineteenth-century English-language books, but the earliest Lithuanian-language knitting books I’ve discovered so far were published almost a hundred years later. Sodžiaus menas kn. 5: Mezgimo-nėrimo raštai (Village Arts no. 5: Knitting patterns), by Antanas Tamošaitis, came out in 1933 and Mezgimas (Knitting), by Anastazija Tamošaitis, Antanas’s wife, was published in 1935. 

Together, these two books form a wonderful foundation in Lithuanian knitting. Antanas wrote about the spiritual significance of folk art and documented colorwork motifs and mitten and sock designs from regions around the country, while Anastazija wrote instructions for knitting a variety of accessories using traditional motifs and colors. Mezgimas also includes instructions for knitting techniques that were not traditional in Lithuania, but which Anastazija may have learned about in The Encyclopedia of Needlework, by Thérèse de Dillmont, which was published in 1884 and became a hugely popular reference throughout Europe.

Most of the Lithuanian-language knitting books in my collection were published between 1959 and 1979, during the Soviet period. Most were written by Lithuanian authors, but others were translated from Russian. I found these books on eBay and at used book shops, street fairs, and flea markets in Lithuania. These books are quite similar to the vintage English-language knitting books I have from the same period. They include basic knitting and crochet instructions, a stitch library, and a collection of projects. Many of the books also include basic dressmaking information, along with tips for sizing garments which may be quite detailed or as vague as, “Models are given in one size. If you make a gauge swatch, it will be very easy for you to determine the number of stitches to cast on for your own size.”

I’ve been learning to read and speak Lithuanian, so at first it was a challenge to figure these books out, but since I’m quite fluent in knitting and they all have lots of charts and diagrams, it’s been a good way to learn the parts of the language related to knitting.

The basics: Grandmother’s knitting

My grandmother taught me how to knit when I was in kindergarten, maybe even before that. I started out with a stockinette-stitch swatch and wrapped the working yarn snugly around my left index finger, like a bobbin, to control my tension. 

“When you knit the yarn goes in the back and the needle goes in the back of the stitch,” Grandma told me. “And when you purl, the yarn goes in the front, and the needle goes into the front of the stitch.” The formula was easy for me to remember and I learned to knit and purl with equal ease. I didn’t know that this was called the Eastern Uncrossed or Combination method of knitting, commonly used in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe. To me, this was just Grandma’s knitting.

One of my favorite Lithuanian knitting books, a small volume called Megzkime Pačios (Let’s Knit) by O. Jarmulavičienė, presents the basic knitting stitches just the way my grandmother taught me. Other books offer up instructions for the standard modern-European style of knitting and note that this is the common method used in books, but in the old days, most knitters (in Lithuania) used močiutės mezgimas, or “grandmother’s knitting.” Both methods are interchangeable, the authors explain, as long as you pay attention to your work. In general, the books do not show drawings with hands, but the working yarn always trails off the drawings to the left, with the assumption that knitters will carry the yarn in their left hand, no matter which way they form their stitches.

Knit and purl stitches

Knit = back/back. To make a knit stitch, hold the working yarn in the back, and insert the right needle into the back of the stitch. Pick the yarn with the tip of the right needle and pull it through to form a new stitch.

Won’t you twist your stitches if you knit into the back? Not if you purl wrapping your yarn in the opposite direction. 

Purl = front/front. To make a purl stitch, hold the working yarn in front, and insert the right needle into the front of the stitch. Pick the yarn in the same manner as you do when knitting.

With this technique, switching back and forth between knits and purls is easy and fast. After I practiced for a bit, the process became unconscious as the yarn “automatically” moved to the front or back of my needles as necessary for the next stitch. Ribbing and cables followed quickly for me, and I never realized that purling was supposed to be difficult. Moving your yarn to the front or back of the needles is something that is not even mentioned in Lithuanian knitting books.

To knit without twisting your stitches, always work into the leading (or right) leg of the stitch. It doesn’t matter if it’s in front of or behind the needle.

Decreases

While I was doing my research on Lithuanian knitting techniques, I stumbled onto an interesting discussion in the Combination Knitters group on Ravelry about Lithuanian (and Russian) knitting and how to work left- and right-leaning decreases. This is an important topic, and perhaps the most confusing to knitters who knit in the Lithuanian fashion. Because your stitches are oriented on the needle with the leading leg of the stitch at the back, the normal decrease instructions in English-language knitting books don’t make any sense when you look at your stitches on the needle.

Left-slanting decrease 

A left-slanting decrease is usually worked as ssk in America these days. In my Lithuanian knitting books it’s usually called simply "knit two together," but because the stitches are turned, you put the right needle into the back of the two stitches to knit them together and the final decrease leans to the left. Sometimes it is explained like this: 2 akys, sumegztos kartu gerai iš apačios (knit two together from the bottom, or back). But it’s not usually so simple, because knitting terminology is not standardized in Lithuania, so each author explains things in her own way.

• If you knit in the Western fashion, with the leading leg in front, this will be twisted. You can turn the stitches around first so they don’t twist, if you prefer, which is usually called ssk. 

• If you knit in the Lithuanian fashion, with the leading leg in back, this will not be twisted.

Right-slanting decrease 

A right-slanting decrease is worked as k2tog in America. In my Lithuanian books, this is sometimes explained as 2 akys, sumegztos kartu gerai iš viršaus (knit two together from the top, or front). This creates a decrease that slants to the right, but the stitches are twisted. Depending on the yarn texture and color, this may or may not be noticeable in the finished knitting.

• If you knit in the Western fashion, with the leading leg in front, this will not be twisted.

• If you knit in the Lithuanian fashion, with the leading leg in back, this will be twisted. You can turn the stitches around first so they don't twist, if you prefer. There's no formal name for this maneuver, but it is similar in concept to ssk. It is actually only necessary to turn the second stitch around. The first stitch will be the bottom stitch in the decrease, and will be hidden.

All of this is very technical and fascinating to me, but you can knit any of the projects in Lithuanian Knitting: Continuing Traditions in any techniques you like. In fact, most of the projects are knitted in the round, which eliminates many of the differences between močiutės mezgimas and standard Western knitting techniques.

A Lithuanian knitting book made with lots of Lithuanian involvement

I’ve been working on this book with my co-author June Hall since 2007, with several trips to Lithuania for both of us between then and now, along with uncounted hours of writing, knitting, and editing.* We are finally ready to send the files to the printer. To pay for this, I’ve been holding a Pubslush crowdfunding campaign (like Kickstarter but only for books) and we're over 100% funded today with just 5 days left to go! I’m so excited that so many people are helping me make this dream come true in a way that will give back to the Lithuanian economy. The book is being printed in Lithuania, and the extra funds that come in will go to our Lithuanian art director, Marius Žalneravičius.

I hope you’ll take a minute to check out the fundraiser. If you like what you see, you can also pre-order your copy through this campaign and get some special rewards as an extra bonus!

Thanks!

~ Donna

_____

* Not to mention lots of language study, leading up to and during the project.

More from Deb: I signed on early at Pubslush to get one of the first copies of Lithuanian Knitting. This is going to be a very cool book that I’ve been following and supporting since it was a vague dream. If you go to the Pubslush page, you can see Donna’s video and hear some snippets of Lithuanian music and see preliminary pages—well worth the 4 minutes.

There are more posts in the book's blog tour here. Felicity Ford's post has a photo of Lithuanian coarse-wool sheep.

A gem of a book: Felicity Ford's KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook

EDITED March 7, 2015 to add: Felicity Ford's KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook is now one of the wonderful books (including Kate Davies' and Elizabeth Lovick's and more) available in the U.S. from Meg Swansen's Schoolhouse Press. I'll link here to the "new books" page where you can currently find them. Thanks to M.C. for letting me know.

Sorry there's been such a gap in posts. I've been washing fiber and writing up information about sheep and llamas. I'll be back.

_______

Having met Felicity Ford and also watched her in action at Shetland Wool Week last fall, I was predisposed to like the book that she had just embarked on making. That book has just become available (in both print and electronic formats). Backing Felicity’s Kickstarter for the book didn't require any thought at all. I knew what she would make would be worthwhile, and worth having, because Felicity is one of the most creative and intelligent people I’ve ever met (plus one of the most unpretentious).

While I have access to a bunch of high-quality photos related to the book project, I’m going to season this post with photos I’ve taken. Trust me that every production value in Felicity's project is top-notch. The reason I want to use my photos is to represent the way my conversations with Felicity—in person and now in her book—have, even when tangentially experienced, enriched the light and color and ideas in my life.

I knew I’d like The KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook. I didn’t expect to love it and to be inclined to take it everywhere with me.

The printed book has a generous but not bulky page size; has been printed on high-quality paper; and is slim enough to tuck into my backpack next to my computer (the comparatively small backpack already containing that computer, the projector, the cables, my books, travel food and utensils, my 3-1-1 bag, and a novel). When I began to dip into it, I discovered that it is also, Tardis-like, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and it provided me with enjoyable reading and discoveries while I traveled—and because I was teaching for the two-week trip, I only had a few moments in which to sample a few of the pages.

The book has been traveling with me, and we both met up with friends.

Nonetheless, it influenced how I went through my days.

One of the things the book is about is paying attention to what’s around us, and what we care about.

I practice this anyway (practice, which means improvement is always possible), and Felicity’s book tweaked my viewpoint in ways that I enjoyed. During teaching weeks, I like to take solo walks to refresh myself and my thoughts, preferably in quiet places full of plants and animals and views. Often I take photos. As I took this week’s walks, I found myself taking different photos than usual, and thinking differently about how I might use those images not as ends in themselves or simple aids to paying attention but as inspiration for Fair Isle–style knitting.

One or two pages before bed gave me plenty to ponder overnight and on the next day’s hike. I could actually spend a week, or a month, on every cluster of concepts. Pacing can fit the available contours of time. There’s lots here: it’s clearly and concisely presented. On pages that I found myself wanting to linger over.

Another thing Felicity encourages is trying things, and making mistakes—those being (as many of us have discovered repeatedly) good ways to learn what works.

The intent of the book is to help us take things we love and learn enough about their shapes and colors, and about interpretation, to use those treasures as inspiration for knitting. Step by step, she leads us through the process, with philosophy and progressive examples, in ways that I’m guessing even the most tentative designer (or not-yet-designer) will find supportive and effective.

Colo(u)r. I have to mention color because many people find it intimidating. The way Felicity works with color here, and shows the reader her process in detail, will be a blessing to many.

Here’s what just carrying the book around with me last week and reading a few pages at night produced in my life:

Waiting for the ferry in Anacortes, Washington: walking around and enjoying the day.

Sunset from the top of Young Hill, San Juan Island.

 

English Camp, San Juan Island, the windy day when I walked the shore instead of the woods.

English Camp, San Juan Island.

American Camp, San Juan Island.

South Beach, San Juan Island.

English Camp, San Juan Island.

Sunset from Young Hill, San Juan Island.

Madrona tree.

South Beach, San Juan Island.

Driftwood at South Beach, San Juan Island.

Dawn from the early ferry.

Ferry coming into the Anacortes dock. My car was #1.

As I was pulling those photos, I found some others on the computer that also seem to warrant contemplation. Here's just one, from Iceland. It would be interesting to extract some patterns and colors from this and see what happened.

Now, some of those just might get turned into knitting concepts that would let me wear one of my favorite places even when I’m elsewhere. . . .

Can I give this book ten stars on a five-star scale? Well, I do.

For a glimpse of Felicity’s personality and of the book, check out the Kickstarter page and video. To order it, here’s the place.

___

Post written at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Please excuse any typos.

Yarn (and fiber) interlude

I’ve gotten swept away in preparations for the two Shetland-wool-specific retreats that I’ll be facilitating in the San Juan Islands of Washington State during the first two weeks in November. There’s a lot to do: the fact that I enjoy the activities doesn’t shorten the hours required to complete all the related tasks. Fortunately I have help this year with a number of the administrative details, so I can focus on the wools and the plan and the written materials.

Nonetheless, the intervals between my blog posts have gotten stretched out again.

Here’s what I think will be a quick post, about some of the yarns and fibers that I “met” during my recent travels in Iceland and Shetland.

First, it’s generally my practice to acquire natural-colored skeins of representative yarns for sampling and the archives. One of these excursions, however, involves COLOR! Brace yourself. Second, I haven’t swatched up everything that I obtained to sample, and I didn’t get “one of everything,” either. I only packed home things that posed the most intriguing questions or possibilities.

Icelandic

When the participants in the North Atlantic Native Sheep & Wool Conference toured the Ístex factory in Iceland, several of us asked repeatedly whether the Einband, or laceweight yarn, was spun from the same fiber mix as the other all-Icelandic-wool yarns, like Léttlopi, Álafasslopi, Bulkylopi, and the unspun Plötulopi. It feels a good deal coarser. We were equally repeatedly assured that it was spun from identical wool, and that it would soften up when washed.

We all found that a bit hard to believe. So of course I bought a skein and I ran the yarn through my usual series of tests: an approximately 4-inch (10cm) square in stockinette, followed by an approximately 6-inch (15-cm) square in a pattern stitch. 

I washed them.

The results, although not extremely soft, were indeed a good deal softer than I had any reason to expect. Veering from my standard practice, I knitted two small stockinette swatches that I left unwashed and attached to the corners of the “real” swatches for ongoing tactile comparison.

Even with the mix of under- and outercoats, and the subsequent slightly hairy surface, stitch definition is quite clear in the comparatively complex Japanese pattern that I decided would be interesting to try out.

(Japanese pattern book, I think the one with 300 patterns, must go look it up. #164.)

I also purchased, but have not yet spun, a carded batt of Icelandic Leadersheep wool. This is because I liked the color, and I like the Leadersheep. A lot. (Here’s a 9-minute video. If that's not enough, part 2 has another 9 minutes.)

Looking forward to this one.

I’ve already shared the Plötulopi swatches.

Greenlandic

No, I didn’t go to Greenland, but the Greenlanders came to Iceland for the conference and brought wool with them. Greenlandic sheep are closely related to Icelandic sheep, because that’s where a lot of their bloodlines originated.

.

Nice yarn, great texture, lofty, promising durability.

My patterned swatch. . . .

(Barbara Walker 2, German Herringbone Rib, p. 124.)

And then I got my copy of Cat Bordhi’s new Versatildes e-book, and what was handiest was the Greenlandic yarn and appropriate needles, so I made a tiny-tilde swatch from it, too.

I watched this book germinate and grow and am glad to now have a copy on my hard drive to play with further.

Shetland

Jamieson & Smith in Shetland has a new yarn, which is a worsted-spun aran-weight. They’ve previously had a woolen-spun yarn in this weight. It may be a little confusing for a while that there are two J&S aran yarns, spun from differently prepared fibers, but I’m glad they’re giving us options—especially worsted-spun ones.

I like this new yarn a lot. The colors relate to those in the worsted-spun fingering-weight Heritage yarns. 

The introductory swatch, the stockinette one, is in one of the packets I posted back, but not one with fleece in it that needed to be washed so it hasn’t surfaced yet (first things first). But I took a photo of it in transit. I think. I don’t recognize that background. It does match the one below, so . . . even though the color doesn’t quite match, this is it. . . .

Here’s where I played with it in pattern, because I did this after I got home. 

(Barbara Walker 1, Twin Leaf Lace, p. 210b.)

Now. Thinking about woolen-spun and worsted-spun, I decided on a demonstration project, replacing color alternations with yarn alternations. I would have worked with woolen- and worsted-spun natural white fingering-weight yarn except that the whites didn’t quite match. Ella Gordon at Jamieson & Smith helped me get two greens that came in the same color and I began my experiment, using Martina Behm’s “Leftie" pattern. (“Leftie” is a fun pattern. I’m knitting it now with color contrasts out of Wensleydale. It’s the right combination of interesting-but-not-too-interesting that’s ideal for travel knitting. Thanks to Sarah Anderson for demonstrating its value in this regard while we were teaching at Fibre-East.)

That photo is why I know this is all Shetland yarn, including the image above of the worsted-spun aran. Of the two green balls, the one with the beige band is the worsted-spun and the one with the white band is woolen. 

While it was possible to see the distinctions between the two yarns, I wasn’t getting exactly the effect that I wanted.

So I altered the pattern slightly, making the leaf sections (contrasting color in the original pattern) a similar width to the intermediary sections, and started over. The effect shows up most clearly when the shawl is held up to the light, but in person you can see and feel the subtle differences even without backlighting.

I finished the woolen/worsted shawl while I was in Iceland and took the photo just above with the unblocked fabric held up against the window of the apartment where a group of us stayed in Reykjavik. It’s blocked now, and I’ll post a photo of it some month (or year), but right now it’s probably buried under some of the multi-dozen fleeces I’m sorting, labeling, washing, and preparing to transport to Friday Harbor, Washington.

And it’s time to get back to that work.

But . . . if you haven’t encountered Barb Parry’s book, Adventures in Yarn Farming, it’s delightful. I’ve had it for a while but only read it once I got home.

Iceland 7 - Hveravellir, and Þingborg

For reasons why the blog posts are getting farther apart, check out my newsletter (of which there will be a new release soon, but this blog post comes first).

Up over the top

After learning more about winter housing of sheep, we got back into our mountain-ready bus and went up over the Icelandic Highlands. There are reservoirs providing hydroelectric power, and we were told there are also mountains and glaciers and gorgeous views.

We made what passed for a lunch stop at Hveravellir, a well-known geothermal area between the two largest glaciers in Iceland, Langjökull and Hofsjökull. 

Apparently this was not an appropriate place for a busload of people to make a mid-route stop. I’m sure the folks at Hveravellir are nice enough on a normal basis, but our welcome was not warm and we ate in the rain. Ólafur assured us this was not typical of Icelandic hospitality. I walked over to take a look at some of the hot springs, although I didn’t venture out to see the farther areas. I was already coming down with a bit of a cold and didn't want to push my luck.

The map two images back shows the tip of the Langjökull, the larger portion of which appears below. After lunch we drove south along the road that skirts its eastern edge. 

After a lot of this. . . .

and this. . . .

. . . beautiful in a moonscape sort of way (and, amazingly, inhabited at this season by occasional sheep), we arrived at a small white building with a sign on it, not knowing what to expect except that Ólafur said that they would be glad to see us, and would have some refreshments for us. Both of those sounded appealing.

Þingborg

Written Icelandic retains two ancient characters that aren’t familiar to people accustomed to most western European alphabets: eð or eth (uppercase Đ, lowercase ð), which also is used in Faroese, and þorn or thorn (Þþ), not used in any other modern language. Although their pronunciations are slightly different when Icelanders say words using them, someone new to the language doesn’t hear much difference, putting a variant of “th” in place of both (there’s also a touch of “d” in the ð). This can be handy to know when looking for names involving eð or þorn on a keyboard that doesn’t make producing those symbols easy: type in "th."

Thus the website for Þingborg can be found by seeking Thingborg, and the pronunciation is not far off from that.

So: What was this place we were coming to, cold and a bit hungry and wet and having crossed a wide expanse of the moon?

Wool, it said—a friendly word.

Another sign around back:

We went through a small door into the lower level of what used to be a school, and found smiling women welcoming us with a table with a selection of cheeses and breads and beverages: quite the contrast to Hveravellir.

After we nibbled and chatted and warmed up a bit, someone among us discovered that if we climbed up a short flight of stairs, went through a medium-sized workspace, and down another half-flight, there was a shop.

Keep in mind that we had already seen superb Icelandic fiber-related shops, including the Handknitting Association of Iceland (in Reykjavik) and Ullarselið (in Hvanneyri). This was the end of the conference. We were tired. We may have been just a bit overloaded and jaded.

But what we walked into woke us up all over again.

The building used to be a school, but in 1990 the school moved to a new building and the following year a group started using the space for something knitters and spinners from other parts of the world would recognize as informal guild meetings. Now the structure houses workshops, a small gallery-like area (creatively manifested hats! in the front rooms, not for sale), meeting rooms, a dye studio, and the shop (finished goods and yarns at eye level, but look under the tables for carders, spinning wheels, and other tools—no small selection, all neatly boxed and ready to be carried off to new homes).

Did I need more wool? I did not—but I left with some yarn, and a small cake of plötulópi (unspun roving) which did not feel quite the same as the version I’d picked up at Ullarselið. (It wasn’t—I’ll explain why in a moment and offer a brief comparison of the two.)

The yarn? I struggled. And I yielded.

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll make with these, but with those colors . . . well, they’re just too beautiful. Yes, when I stray from the naturals of my studies, I find myself fingering the blues quite often. Both skeins were made by Dóra Óskar. The top one is indigo-dyed, and if the bottom one’s dyestuff has been identified it’s in Icelandic and I don’t know, but it’s been overdyed on a mix of light and dark fibers.

I’m open to suggestions on how to use these skeins. Yardage wasn’t on the labels, but I counted about 231 yards (211m) of the indigo and 208 yards (190m) of the variegated. Singles, probably about fingering weight ("4-ply" singles, which always seems as weird to me as calling a yarn worsted weight).

Our adventure at Þingborg continued with more random discoveries. After we’d been there a while, someone asked, “Have you seen upstairs?” Nope . . . so I made my way up another narrow staircase and found a magical room where part of the reason for the difference between Ístex plötulópi and Þingborg plötulópi became apparent. They’re produced on different machines (as it turns out, the fiber is selected and washed a bit differently, too).

I’m pretty sure this is some of Pat Green’s equipment for carding and making pencil roving. That’s his logo on the side of the drum at lower left, and the style (and color) of the machinery look like his. You won’t find information on his cottage-industry tools on his website, and shipping would be a serious challenge, but this room contains just the right tools for the jobs they do and they’re being put to very good use.

The story starts here. . . .

And goes along to about here. . . .

With intermediate steps that I found equally fascinating, but others might not, at least not without the machine present in its entirety so the pieces make sense (instead of being just a series of snapshots).

Next, however, is the piece that might interest more of us. On the left is the plate of plötulópi (unspun roving) from Ístex and on the right is what I got at Þingborg, Yes, they both come in colors, but for my demonstration swatches I cut out the variable of color and pick natural white or as close to it as I can get (which explains the thrill of breaking out of the box with the two dyed skeins shown above).

They are both splendid fiber preps that I would happily use. The differences are subtle. Let's look at what they are, and why they exist.

Icelandic wool is bulk-washed at Blönduós, in northern Iceland. That’s true for the fibers that end up in both of these materials. What’s different is that Ístex wool is processed in much larger lots. During a slow time at the plant, the Þingborg folks bring in specially selected fleeces and use the same equipment, with the help of the normal professionals who operate it, but a different type of scouring solution. The Þingborg plate had already been wound doubled (which is the way plötulópi is often used). The Ístex version was wound as a single strand, although I wound off a doubled portion for my comparison swatches.

What differences did I perceive?

In knitting, the unspun Þingborg wool was slightly less fragile than the Ístex wool. The fibers were slightly longer. (Neither, of course, is held together by twist.)

They worked up at almost the same gauge; the widths of the swatches are identical, and the Þingborg swatch (on the left) is exactly one row shorter than the Ístex swatch (on the right)—but there are 19 rows in its stockinette area to 20 rows in the other’s. (I eyeball my swatch lengths, instead of counting.) Both combine the two coats of the fleeces; the Þingborg swatch is slightly softer (very marginal: they are both delightful). The Þingborg stitches are not quite as bulky or dense as the Ístex ones, the fabric has a touch more luster, and it drapes more. Hmmm . . . I might be able to demo that. . . .

Istex:

Þingborg:

You could probably work up the Þingborg fiber at a slightly tighter gauge, but I like the fabric as it is and wouldn’t want to.

On the other hand, the Ístex swatch has a bulkier hand, is slightly whiter (the Þingborg has a very subtle ivory cast, only evident when it’s right next to the Ístex), and is more even.

Ístex:

Þingborg:

Which would I want to knit with most?

BOTH! For different reasons.

Yet at first glance, they’re identical, except for the size of the plate and the fact that one has been wound with two strands together (Þingborg) and one is a single strand.

Now I need to finish putting together something that resembles a newsletter—and wash more Shetland fleeces. The two Shetland-focus spinning retreats are starting in a month, and I have a significant amount of prep done—and more to be accomplished. Four more fleeces arrived yesterday and I need to get them into the bathtub.

{Note: Because the first Shetland-wools retreat was full to overflowing, we added a second one, November 2 to 7 (arrive November 2, retreat November 3 to 6, depart November 7). They're both in the San Juan Islands, in Washington state. There are still some spaces available in the additional retreat. (Background information is here; questions? check in with jess at drobson dot info—I'm washing and packing wool and prepping handouts.) Given what it takes to put together an all-Shetlands event like this, it's not something that will likely come along again. I might do another, but right now I think this is it. Reasons to be explained in that newsletter I mentioned. I'm having a blast getting ready—and it's taking months, and thousands of miles, to do it right. . . . }

Iceland 4 - Ístex

I’m taking our Icelandic adventures a bit out of order, in order to relate them logically to each other. This post concerns the trip to Iceland’s spinning mill, which was the first place our North Atlantic Native Sheep and Wools Conference bus stopped after we left Reykjavik together. The mill is only about fifteen minutes from the city.

After shearing, Icelandic wool is scoured in Blönduós, in the northwest. Blönduós was our primary base of operations for the conference, although we didn’t arrive there until late in the night of that first day together. The scouring facility wasn’t on our itinerary because we were in Blönduós before the year's shearing commenced.

Once the wool is clean, it is transferred to Ístex, located in Mosfellsbaer. Ístex was formed in 1991 to salvage the capacity previously provided by Álafoss of Iceland, which was going down the tubes in the late 1980s. Farmers and other shareholders stepped in to keep the Icelandic wool industry going. The old factory buildings within the town are now artists’ studios and galleries. We visited the modern facility in an industrial park.

The warm welcome we received included a brief slide show about Icelandic wool. I especially enjoyed the photo of the suppliers: credit where credit is due.

As we saw later in our trip, sheep are located throughout Iceland, including in some unlikely-looking environments.

Lambswool is kept separate from adult fleeces, as are solid natural-colored fleeces, and the white adult fleeces are divided into two grades. The grade one is spun in Iceland, and the grade two is sold out of the country as carpet wool. Although grade one is worth more to the farmers than grade two, it can be a challenge to get the grading done appropriately. There are no “official” wool graders.

So the clean wool arrives from Blönduós.

The washed bulk fiber combines the two types of wool that are characteristic of Icelandic fleeces, one shorter and softer (called þel or thel) and the other longer, sturdier, and more lustrous (called tog). These are processed together at Ístex.

Isn’t that lovely?

The lambswool tends to be softer and whiter than the adult fleeces—although as I mentioned in a previous post, it’s the fall shearings that are used for these yarns, because they are longer, cleaner, and whiter than the spring shearings. We were told that because of the clarity of its color, the lambswool is used primarily in the white rovings and yarns—so if you want the softest possible yarn from their output, you’ll select the white (and dye it yourself, if you want colors).

Ístex begins by dyeing the colors that it will need in huge vats. The dye area was amazingly clean (the whole factory was).

The colors that come out the other end of the factory as yarn are characteristically made from blends of colors—that’s what makes them so interesting. The blending process starts with big clumps of the components.

They are fed through a variety of equipment that gradually tosses the colors together.

The fibers tumble through a variety of blowers and conveyor belts and bins.

Finally, they’re pretty well mixed.

Next they go to the carding equipment—and yes, we’ve changed colors. Each part of the plant was processing a different color run. The carding section was working black.

I’ve seen a lot of mills at this point, and am intrigued by the differences in the way the same types of actions are managed. This plant had a lot of equipment with sections made of wooden slats (those sections move the fiber from one place to another). Also, the sheets of partially carded fiber that the following machine laid down were wider and thicker than I’ve seen in other places, and the equipment made a cool zigzag impression on the wool.

At the end of the carding there’s what is sometimes called pencil roving—and in Icelandic wool, fiber at this stage of processing becomes the end product that is sold as plötulopi, which can be knitted in that unspun form. Yes, it pulls apart easily because there’s no twist holding it together, but because of the fibers’ length the simple structure of the knit stitches is adequate to make it stable in a finished garment.

I’ve got a plötulopi photo, but it will need to go into another post. This post has already been delayed for two days while I try to find time to get that photo off my camera and into place here. I don’t have time today, either—!

Most of the roving does go on to the next process, which is spinning.

Cones of yarn are, to me, one of life’s delights. There’s enough there to really do something with. Cones are mostly sold to weavers.

For knitters, though, balls of yarn are the standard put-up for the lopi yarns, and skeins are the intermediate step.

Bright pink yarn was being turned into balls on the day we were there, and people who hang out in yarn shops know that there are a lot of different types of mechanically produced balls. The lopi balls are distinctive, and I saw how they get made.

This is the nifty machine that does the job. The cores around which the yarn is wound lie horizontally (I’ve seen a lot in other mills that were vertical). The end of a strand is caught on each core.

Wrapping begins.

And continues.

Until there’s a nice, fat ball.

These are ejected from the cores and picked up by little arms from above that transport them. . . .

. . . . and drop them into cradles.

This was fun: then a correctly shaped tool comes down and gives each ball a little squeeze.

I don’t think the label went on until the balls were inside that next area (to the right in the photo below) that I couldn’t see very well. But by the time the balls were in the clear box on the left of that photo, they did have their bands in place. Sorry some of this is mysterious: the x-ray vision on my camera wasn’t working.

The next bit of machinery packed the balls, ten at a time, in plastic bags, sealed them, and added an external label.

Packs went into boxes, which in turn were transferred to the warehouse.

The yarns from Icelandic wool that come out of the mill are all singles, in varying weights. They are:

• Plötulopi - the unspun roving, which can be worked singly or combined (often two strands together)
• Léttlopi - similar to an aran or heavy worsted weight, works up at about 18 stitches / 4 inches (10 cm)
• Álafosslopi - a bulky weight, works up at about 13 stitches / 4 inches (10 cm)
• Bulkylopi - even bulkier, works up at about 10 stitches / 4 inches (10 cm)
• Einband - laceweight, and feels a good deal stiffer in the ball than the other yarns although we were told that it is spun from the same fibers and softens when it is washed; I have a ball to test; gauge varies, as with any yarn intended for lace

The mill also produces:

• Kambgarn - Merino, they call it light worsted but I’d call it sport weight, works up at about 24 stitches / 4 inches (10 cm)
• Hosuband - 80% wool (not specified) and 20% nylon, worsted weight, works up at about 19 stitches / 4 inches (10 cm)

At the end of our visit, our hosts presented each of us with what has to be one of the best souvenirs of the entire trip.

Before, during, and after our trip, the Bárðarbunga volcano was (and still is) acting up. Therefore shortly before our arrival the folks at Ístex designed a pattern for commemorative mittens and packed copies up with the yarn we would need to make them.

A stop later that same day had knitting needles, which sold out of size 4.5mm in a flash. (This was a group of sheep-interested people and not specifically knitters, but a remarkably high proportion of the recipients of the project bag were casting on by the end of the day. I knit loosely, so I dropped down a size and didn't need to compete for the specified needles.)

I got a cuff worked, but discovered that knitting in a bus when I’m seated in a position where I can’t move my left arm very much may be the only situation (other than too much time at the keyboard) that causes my hands to hurt. We did celebrate someone else’s finished pair during one of our times on the bus, and I’m sure many others have been completed since. Mine will come along as travel knitting this fall.

Thanks to Ístex for a terrific start to our journeys around the world of Icelandic sheep and wool!

Cunningsburgh (Shetland) show, part 3 - other fibery things

I didn’t see everything at the Cunningsburgh show, even though I think I was there for nine hours. No, it’s nowhere near as big as the major festivals in the U.S., but there was an abundance of things of extreme interest and quality. I only saw the horses and ponies from a distance, and didn’t even realize there were classes for dogs until I got home and looked at the catalog of entries more closely.

So. A few snapshots of some fibery things. It was a treat to be able to wander through the entries and admire them. When I'm teaching at a festival, I rarely have time to look at the displays of skeins and finished objects, and whenever I am (reluctantly) judging a competition, I end up feeling like I've made my commentaries in that process. I judge reluctantly because I don't like the competitive element. I judge once in a while, however, because having public presentations of craft may encourage more people to try their hands, or inspire further explorations.

Many inspiring items were put on display at Cunningsburgh. Some of them won prizes. Some things that I loved did not take home ribbons. And so it goes.

This jumper (pullover sweater) was crocheted by Jane Outram. Terrific crochet.

Very gifted in multiple techniques and color use, she also made these bands with card- (or tablet-) weaving:

She used woolen-spun jumperweight (fingering) yarns from Jamieson & Smith (not the same as Jamieson’s). Card-weaving really stresses the warp threads—and produces incredibly strong bands, partly because the component strands need to be very sturdy and partly because of the structure itself. I asked Jane if she’d uptwisted the yarns (to increase their strength) and she said she hadn’t. That’s quite a testament to the integrity of those yarns. Not many woolen-spun yarns would stand up to card-weaving.

Jamieson & Smith also makes worsted-spun jumperweight yarns, although in a very limited range of eleven colors. (And they’re about to introduce worsted-spun aran-weights, one of which I’m sampling right now. The worsted spinning not only strengthens the yarn but brings out the wool’s natural luster. I can’t break this stuff with my hands, although it’s still lightweight.)

I found the color use and design of the bands absolutely enchanting.

But moving along. . . .

Nearby was this piece, which I initially thought was needlepointed (in petit point: the stitches were tiny). But no, those stitches were square and it was cross-stitched: densely, to create a solid image that nonetheless didn’t distort the foundation fabric. TINY, TINY stitches!

It was made by Louise Jamieson. It was one of those works of art that looks great from a distance and also reveals even more when closely observed. The background was worked in a lighter weight of thread so the figure was in slight relief—effective, but you really wouldn’t consciously perceive the shift unless you were peering at the work quite intently.

Several people who noticed the image as I was standing nearby spontaneously and easily identified the person shown.

The costume is one from the Up Helly Aa winter fire festival. There are fiber stories involved in the squads’ costumes, too, but that’s for another day.

Back to the Cunningsburgh show, and a few of the remarkable items I saw, this time in the building that contained the baked goods and most of the knitting and spinning.

One interesting category was the “Colourbox Competition,” for Fair Isle items made from at least four shades of eight specified colors.

Knitted cardigans (by Barbara Isbister, Barbara Johnson, and, again, Barbara Isbister):

Jumpers (pullovers, left edge and center by Barbara Isbister; I managed to miss the identifying number for the one on the right edge):

Gloves (these were handspun, by Anna Simpson):

A gorgeous lace shawl (by Yvonne Robertson):

And another inventive scarf (by Mavis Ross):

Handspun skeins (by Elizabeth Johnston, Mavis Ross, Julia Downing, Anna Simpson, and Alexis Keith):

And, in another area, some fleeces. . . .

(AQR Cross, managed by Hamish Hunter)

(Jane Outram . . . see the crocheted jumper and the card woven bands above)

And I can’t resist including this final photo from the sheep area, where a group of gentlemen were having a discussion.

Felicity Ford's super-cool upcoming book

Okay, so there’s a Kickstarter campaign to fund Felicity Ford’s book on designing colorwork from images in everyday life. You’ll want to go look at the presentation over on the Kickstarter site, and don’t you love the fact that it got fully funded very, very quickly? With Kickstarter, only fully funded projects get any backing at all. Whew. The book will definitely be produced. That’s good news for all of us, because this project is inventive and charming and intelligent, as is Felicity herself. I met her during Shetland Wool Week last fall. I signed up for the campaign to be sure I got a copy of the book as soon as it was available.

Lots of Felicity’s work involves elements of vernacular life: sounds, colors, textures. I’ve borrowed the word vernacular for use here; it’s normally applied with reference to languages or architecture (living spaces). One of my all-time favorite books is Bernard Rudofsky’s Streets for People, which I read not long after it was published in 1969 (then I went and discovered his earlier Architecture without Architects). From my perspective, the type of awareness that characterized Rudofsky’s work also imbues Felicity Ford’s. In addition, I appreciate the extent to which she is well aware of the way women’s contributions to culture have been overlooked because they are most often part of the everyday texture of history, not its cataclysms.

Thinking of Felicity’s work brings out some of my pleasure in language and big-picture theories at the same time that she is absolutely grounded in the simple delights of life. I treasure that uncommon balance between the academic (for lack of a better word) and the practical.

I’ve asked Felicity to talk a bit here about what she does and why, because I think you will enjoy hearing from her. Check out the Kickstarter campaign—be sure to watch the video!—and then come back here for some background. You’ll see immediately, I think, why the way her mind encounters the world deserves all the support and nurturing the fiber community can offer, and why I’m thrilled that her book already has the green light.

Like me, Felicity is avid to see connections and loves details and thus writes at some length. Make a cup of tea and enjoy a journey through parts of her world.

____

Felicity Ford on:

SOUND

Sound describes texture and place, which are central themes in how I approach my knitting. When I choose yarn for a project, I am mainly interested in the yarn's provenance and character, and working with recorded sound allows me to explore those aspects of any given yarn. The KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook uses Jamieson & Smith 100% Shetland wool throughout, for reasons I shall get into shortly! But to introduce the idea of a combined sound + wool approach, I want to lead with the Rough Fell breed, whose fleece sounds amazing.

Siiri Kolka took the wonderful picture above in 2012, and in it, I have attached contact microphones to my wool combs and am listening to the amplified sound of combing Rough Fell fibres in preparation for spinning. Even unamplified, if you pull that fleece apart beside your ears, you can hear the hooks, the kemp, the texture, the grit! But amplified, the satisfying scratchy crunch of these fibres speaks directly to my knitter's sense of touch.

Deb wrote recently about wool maybe having a terroir, and to me the sound of the Rough Fell's wool speaks exactly to that idea. It evokes the breed's origins in the distinctive Cumbrian landscape in Northern England. Rough Fell sheep are often kept up on the Fell, and even their name evokes the craggy, moor-covered, mountainous qualities of this environment. Listening to the sounds of the wind whipping over a moor in Cumbria, the distinctive clatter of sheep traversing mud, and the awesome rasping in the sound of the fleece itself, I am inspired to knit substantial, sombre cables that will speak of stones and roots and mountains. I would not make anything which lies directly next to my skin out of Rough Fell wool, but listening to where this breed grows, the shepherds who keep it, and the fleece of the animal itself have given me a deep appreciation of this marvellous textile and the strength and stoicism of the Rough Fell breed. 

So sound can be used to highlight the origins of wool in a distinctive landscape. That was the idea behind Hûrd – A KNITSONIK™ PRODUKTION.

Title: Hûrd – A KNITSONIK™ PRODUKTION
Materials: Edited sonic collage feat. field-recordings of shepherds, sheep, and weather in Cumbria, hand-knitted 100% wool yarn, hand-soldered speakers
Concept: In Hûrd, the sounds of the places, landscapes, animals and people from which wool originates are combined with an end product – a knitted soundsystem – so that as you bring the soft speakers up to your ears, you can hear the sources of the wool that covers them. The title comes from the pronunciation spelling for “herd” (as in sheep) and “heard” (as in sound).
2012, WOW: Wonder of Wool and the Art of Knit and Stitch, organised by Rheged

Working with sound is also more generally about noticing the details where you are. Making field recordings (recordings of ambient, environmental sounds) makes you acutely aware of the textures that are present. While listening to those textures, your other senses soak up information. The light. The colour. The surfaces and shapes. Knitting is always near the front of my mind, which means it's just not possible for me to crouch in a field of barley and record the wind rippling over those tiny grain heads without thinking about how to parse those undulations and rhythms into stitches!

Tim Ingold has argued that you can't divide up the world along different sensory planes, and he is right. As a knitting sound artist, the same world that I listen to is the one that I want to knit, and in The KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook, many of the everyday inspirations have previously informed my sound work. I made a radio show for the BBC about the A4074 road in Oxfordshire along which I commute, and last year—when I conceived of this project—my first instinct was to walk to the messy patch of weeds at the end of my street and sit in it, drawing the weeds, whilst also recording the specific sounds present there. The A4074 and the weeds at the end of my street are both subjects for my book, and I figure every knitter will correspondingly have a commute and a local patch that could be beautifully translated into textiles!

The KNITSONIK Audible Textures Resource (the album I am producing to correspond with The KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook) explores these themes. As its name hopefully suggests, it will be full of inspiring textures, and a sense of witness or presence to daily life. The audio will foreground and celebrate the ordinary contexts in which we lead our everyday lives, and also celebrate the Shetland sheep and its origins in the distinctive Shetland landscape. As you knit stranded colourwork in Shetland wool, you will be able to hear the textures and places which inspired me and hopefully recognise echoes of your own life in those sounds. You can also enjoy listening to the landscape where your knitting wool was grown. 

SHETLAND

The knitting for The KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook is going to be made entirely from Shetland wool kindly supplied by Jamieson & Smith. I find this yarn perfect for knitting stranded colourwork; it is bouncy and soft, but it also has a lovely stickiness, which grips my needles pleasingly as I knit. The magic happens when I block colourwork knitted in Shetland wool; the softness becomes really evident at this stage, and the bloomy halo is very forgiving, and covers up many tension issues and gauge crimes!

Deb's own Shetland research may disprove this, however I sometimes think the rich character of the Shetland fleece—its curious synthesis of rough and soft—might be down to the theory of two-breeds-into-one which Oliver Henry always relates when describing the history of Shetland wool. Oliver has been hand grading and sorting Shetland wool for over forty-five years in the Shetland Woolbrokers, and his knowledge of the fleece is born of years of handling it. He speaks of two breeds—one "kindly-woolled" and the other rough—which ran together on the isles (which are largely without fences) and interbred, producing in time what we now think of as the Shetland sheep.

I've talked about the links between sound and wool in my work in Cumbria, and in Shetland, for Wool Week 2013—rather than making a gallery piece—I created a pattern so that knitters could produce their own small speaker-pillows, clad in Shetland wool. Using Udo Noll's amazing aporee platform, I created a corresponding online soundmap from which you may download and play my recordings from Shetland. The shades I have chosen for the speaker visually evoke the proximity of the sea to the land in the isles, and my idea was that the little kit—pillow-speaker; wool; pattern—would enable us to listen to Shetland wool through Shetland wool.

I've talked about the terroir of Rough Fell sheep, but what struck me as being particularly descriptive of Shetland wool, sonically, is the combined soundscape of sheep grazing by inlets, mixed with seabirds. You are never more than three miles from the coast in Shetland, and the constant presence of the sea gives grazing land there a totally unique sonic texture. There is a certain way that sheeps' baas ring into the sky and combine with the cries of terns and oystercatchers, and the whisperings of the nearby sea. The simultaneous presence of sheep and the ocean in a single soundscape references the dual incomes from hand knitting and fishing that define Shetland's economic past.

A SENSE OF PLACE

Travelling in Cumbria, Estonia, and Shetland, I've been struck by something to do with textile traditions. I'm not from any place that has a big knitting tradition, but exposure to places which do have that has made me think carefully about the relationship between textiles and place. 

In Cumbria I learnt that shepherds used to send off their wool and have it return several weeks later as woven cloth. This would be passed to a tailor, who would turn it into a suit to be proudly worn by the shepherd. I can't tell you how many shepherds showed me photos of themselves, and said "that suit was made from my sheep"! In its various stages of life such a suit would go from being Sunday best to everyday wear, and eventually would be worn only for doing rough farm-work. Jane Knowles—who keeps a fantastic flock of Rough Fell sheep in Shap, along with her husband, Brian Knowles—showed me a Sunday-best suit handed down to her through her family, made in the 1950s out of the wool crop. It was made from Rough Fell wool, and was—as you'd expect—quite sturdy in hand! Yet it was also soft, tailored with great care into clothes which had obviously been worn and loved and carefully maintained. 

When I travelled in Estonia I spoke with knitters and weavers enthusiastically reclaiming their textile history. I referred to this a bit on Tom of Holland's blog, but Liis—an amazing spinner, dyer, knitter and weaver—has been recreating an original garment held in the Estonian National Museum textile collection. She has found a striped skirt from the same district where she now lives, and meticulously dyed some of the shades needed to weave herself a contemporary version. In Estonian culture, there are specific colours and textiles for the different regions and parishes—a graphic code, if you will, of regional identity. In recreating a skirt for yourself with reference to this system, you interweave self, history, culture, national identity, and place together. Like the Rough Fell suit—so evocative of place, agricultural history, and a regionally distinct approach to fashion—Liis's skirt seemed to me to be about so much more than simply making a skirt. It is a site of meaning; a place where land, wool, and culture converge.

Similarly, in Shetland, you find incredibly skilled knitters like Hazel Tindall and the other amazing women in the Shetland Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, who have grown up steeped in long and deeply localised knitting traditions like Fair Isle knitting or Unst lace. The amazing sweater I am wearing in the photo above (by the sea, with the all-over Fair Isle patterning) was knitted by Alice Simpson of Whalsay, and it is based on a sweater in a photograph of a fisherman. I love the sweater so much because—as well as being warm, 100% wool, incredibly well made, and gorgeous—it speaks of Shetland's knitting and fishing history, and of the world-class skill of Shetland's knitters. I cannot think of a single item from Shetland which would remind me more greatly of the isles than this sweater, which I treasure for its materiality, references, and associations. 

In my case, living in Reading [an hour’s drive west of London—DR], there is no famous local hand knitting tradition like those I have described in Cumbria, Estonia, and Shetland. Reading was once famous for producing broadcloth, but our regional sheep breed—the Berkshire Nott—is long extinct, and evidence of the localised textile traditions is scant when compared to the treasure troves of the Estonian National Museum, or the numerous textile archives in Shetland. However I have been deeply inspired by connections between place and textiles discovered on my travels, and am on a continual quest to develop my own knitting traditions, related to what is here. About a year ago, I wondered if other knitters in our increasingly mobile and global world would relate to this impulse, and so I devised the Quotidian Colourwork workshop (held during Shetland Wool Week 2013) in which people brought amazing stories and beautiful things from their own everyday lives to celebrate in stranded colourwork. I spent several months preparing for that workshop, and developing systems and tools for turning the things that I found super-inspiring into stranded knitting, and the response to the class where I shared what I had discovered was so enthusiastic that I decided "this needs to be a book". 

SLOW FASHION

The approach I'm advocating in my book is definitely slow; it involves a long-term investment in an idea, and more yarn for swatching than you might usually use to get shades right, etc. But the idea also goes beyond trends, and it's not about what's in "this season", it's about making clothes that are a long-term investment in your relationship with the world around you . . . out of a material which I really feel I can stand behind: Shetland Wool from Jamieson & Smith. Like making a field recording, making the swatches involves taking time to invest in, and appreciate, the immediate environment.

If you think about the Rough Fell suit or Liis's skirt, what is so exciting is the whole process and story that leads to the production of the garments. That is what adds the value! I do not have a flock of sheep (alas!) or a loom (again, alas!) but if I cannot grow or weave wool myself, then perhaps I can find other processes which will give my clothes their own story, and connections with my locality.

The screen prints I have produced [center image below—DR] are intended to communicate this idea of taking textures from the world around us and deepening our connection with that world by translating it into stitches we can wear. The slow time scales involved are an important component! I love Reading's brickwork, it's part of what makes home "home". These are my streets!

I love the swatches as a thought process, beginning with trying things out; testing different colours and shades; refining throughout . . . and I love the very particular challenge of turning the messy, 3D, multi-textured world into the specific, wool-textured medium of stranded colourwork. 

COLOUR 

Wilma Malcolmson—AKA Shetland Designer—said when I met her last year that "We are always in colour". This chimes exactly with my feelings, and to me what is amazing about colour is that it is always around us. The KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook is about celebrating the constant presence of colour in everyday life, and pouring time—and love—into embedding that colour back into the clothes you make, to wear.

___________________________

Deb again: If you haven’t already gone to see Felicity talk in person on that video, here’s the link again. I just watched it for the nth time, and it made me smile today just as much as it did the first time.

I’d like to end this post with a photo that combines one of Felicity’s inspirations with one of the swatches she developed from it.

If you’d like even more perspectives on what Felicity is up to, there are other blogs chatting about the colorwork project this month.

The Kirkwall museum, part 2 - textiles (and serendipity)

The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall requires two posts to even hint at what's there. Part 1, about textile tools, was here.

Now let's look at just a few of the fiber-related items in the collection.

Textiles

Very early in the museum visit, a very early textile.

One of the by-far most interesting items is the Orkney Hood. The original is in the Edinburgh Museum. Made of wool, it dates from somewhere between the 3rd and 7th centuries CE and was found in a bog in the 19th century.

It seems to have been put together out of scraps of fabric, for a child: the fabrics are more sophisticated than the construction, and it is small. The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall displays an exquisite reproduction made by experimental archaeologist Jacqui Wood in 2002. Nearby is a thorough explanation of how it was constructed (you'd want to sit and read this overview for at least an hour: although you can actually experience some of the information from the comfort of your own computer here—with more tablet weaving).

Bogs preserve textiles. This is what is called the Huntsgarth clothing, found in a child's grave from the 18th century: swaddling clothes and a Scotch bonnet.

Farther along, a contemporary tapestry triptych worth visiting in person. It's entitled "St Magnus Earl of Orkney" and was woven by Leila Thomson, completed in 1998.

Obviously, I couldn't get much of a photograph. You get an overlay of me, trying to get a hint of the piece. Leila Thomson's work is at the Hoxa Gallery, another place in Orkney that I knew about before my trip but didn't have an opportunity to visit. Work that is breathtaking on the web has got to be near-miraculous in person.

The line between craft and art blessedly blurs throughout the Orkney Museum. In another area, there are examples of lovely functional knitwear.

While some of the techniques are similar to those of other Northern European knitting traditions, they have their own distinctive qualities in color use and patterning. The knitted garments above are from the 1940s through 1970s, made by Mrs. Tulloch, Cathie Wilson, and Hughina Ritch.

If I'd known more of what I was looking at (that is, if I'd had lots more time to spend in the museum), I would have gotten a better photo of the lower part of the case, where you can almost see needle cases and crochet by Hettie Scott, mentioned in the previous post, in the 1930s.

The 16th through 19th centuries featured tremendous amounts of white and intricate textiles, knitted, crocheted, embroidered . . . 

. . . woven . . .

 . . . linen above, also much cotton . . . 

. . . skipping along here almost irresponsibly, but so many textiles, so little time. . . . 

These stockings are said to be made of bog cotton.

I'd sure like to know more about them. Especially having been introduced to bog cotton.

Admittedly that photo was taken in fall and the "cotton" seems more plentiful in spring, but has anyone actually worked with it to know its suitability to knitting as fine and intricate as those stockings? And how would it wear?

[Edited to add a comment from Elizabeth Lovick via Facebook: "It is NOT possible to spin bog cotton—as soon as you touch it, it crumbles to nothing. . . . I will try again to get [the signage] changed..." Bog cotton apparently has had a few semi-practical uses, but stockings clearly aren't one of them. As an aside, Liz's new book, The Magic of Shetland Lace, is a winner.]

When I left the museum, I had lots of questions. . . . I'll have to go back. . . . 

Serendipity

. . . in part to see all the terrific stuff I glanced past as I focused on matters pertaining to fiber, even though I didn't do them justice, either.

I was captivated by this wooden Noah's ark:

I kept looking more closely. . . .

But I couldn't stay all day.

I haven't even shown you the scale models of some of the area's buildings at specific times in history.

Something that I can't go back and see another time is the special exhibit of woodcarving that was on display. It featured the work of Reynold Eunson.

The carvings were breathtaking,

and I loved seeing the drawings as well.

The room was full of both, and all I lacked was enough time to really spend adequate attention on them. There are more delicious photos on Facebook here.

I wonder what special exhibit will be in place next time? And I'll need to plan even more days in Orkney for exploring. I've just begun to get the gist of what's there.

(It's true: I haven't even shown you North Ronaldsay yet. That will also take more than one post.)

The Kirkwall museum, part 1 - tools

Did I start this post a month ago? I did, indeed. Life has been intervening. I still have a pile o' deadlines that I need to pay attention to. This morning, however, I will give myself the treat of starting this particular post about:

The Orkney Museum in Kirkwall, Orkney

. . . another place where I only managed to get an overview. But wow, the bits that I caught! It's a quirky museum, built into what used to be a house, and you go up, down, and around to get from one space to another. It would be easy to get lost, and that reinforces the sense of discovery. It's like there are magic staircases and hidden doors in walls that lead to other worlds.

I'm not finding a picture in my collection of the real entrance to the place, which I'd like to show, but there's one here, along with a lot of other good information about the site. Access to the museum is through that lovely archway. Step through it into the courtyard for the first view in my photo collection:

The rest of the photos will be out of sequence, and, except for the final handful (in the next post), all relate to textiles. I decided to show you first tools (today) and then textiles (next post, I trust . . . it's almost complete). And then a couple of glimpses of favorite non-textile items. You could spend hours in this museum with a given focus and come out stunned and entranced (time for a restoring cuppa across the street and down a bit at The Reel).

Whereas in many museums textiles are either an afterthought or are sorted out into their own basement corner, fiber exists as a recurring theme throughout the Orkney Museum, which is organized by time periods. This panel comes from one of the final rooms, but the combination of modern and historic (the rune image, graphic motif, and stories of individuals within the social and economic context) echoes the integration of textiles throughout the distinct eras.

The inset photo of the woman shows Hettie Scott. Born without arms, she was an accomplished embroiderer, using her feet. A bit more about Hettie in the next post. The information in this museum continually blew my mind. You could easily spend several days in it. I had a quick trip through—somewhere between one and two hours. (Definitely lost track of time.)

Tools

As I've mentioned before, Orkney's history is very deep. The tools and stories begin with bone implements, plant dyes, and upright looms.

Bones and stones: amazing materials out of which to make functional tools.

The spindle whorls are stone. The batten, next to them, was made from whalebone, likely used for weaving on an upright loom, and dates to the third century BCE (not all that old for this part of the world!). The next two pointed tools are awls; the small item just right of the center is a bodkin, with a bobbin below it. On the right at the far back are needles, and in front of them are three pins.

More spindle whorls—as I recall, these were in the Pictish section—about the fourth century CE.

In the same area there was a whorl inscribed with with ogham writing, used for recording both Pictish and Irish texts. Although found in a Pictish site, the language here is Irish.

I'll step forward a moment to the exhibit of contemporary Orkney craft, which is extraordinary, to show a piece of jewelry that you can buy, inspired by that spindle whorl:

That's a Sheila Fleet piece. There are several fantastic jewelry producers in Orkney.

Calling John Mullarkey! (I thought of you the instant I saw this, John.) Here's a bone weaving tablet:

It was in the Viking area, along with more whorls, needles, needle cases, and other treasures. It is exquisite. I want a whole set of them. And I'm grateful to have cardboard weaving tablets. They work, although with less flair and grace. (There will be another note, and a link, about tablet weaving in the textiles post.)

Moving forward a few centuries, due to lack of time. . . .

This iron spinning wheel was made by a blacksmith named, I think Robert Dick. (The last part of his surname was hidden behind an artifact.)

A more typically constructed wheel for which I forgot to snap a picture of the identification information (Liz?):

These were in an exhibit of the linen industry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

And this amazing wheel was in the drawing room of Baikie House (remodeled 1820), representing the building that now holds the museum when it was a residence.

I love the contrast between the ornate carving and the slatted treadle. Was the treadle original, or perhaps a replacement? (This said by someone who's worn out a treadle and needed to replace it.) Perhaps not. The text says the wheel was purchased with the help of a grant and was "influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement. Made by John Logie for Lady Eliza D'Oyly Burroughs of Trumland House in Rousay."

And now I need to take a breath before we continue by looking at sample textiles in the museum. (I love the rug in that photo of the wheel just above. There's fiber work hiding everywhere, including in plain sight but not noted on the interpretive panels.)

More to come. . . .

I don't think I've mentioned yet that this splendid institution does not have an admission fee. It does have a lovely small shop with well-selected items for sale. . . .