Fair Isle Knitwear – Wool – CraftHub European Project

Properties & Qualities

Application

Clothing

Qualities

3D Textured / tactile

Colour

Brown Grey White

Sample Information

Date of Creation

June 9th, 2021

Culture & Context

Up to the early-1900s Fair Isle crofters would have sheared their own sheep and hand-spun the fleeces themselves, using the resulting wool (both in its natural colours and also dyed with natural dyes) to knit Fair Isle garments and accessories which could be either sold or bartered with. By the early-1900s most crofters were sending their fleeces out to mills in both Shetland and Scotland to be spun, as the cheaper and faster processing cut out the lengthy hand-spinning and hand-dyeing process.During the second half of the 1900s crofters had switched from breeding pure Shetland sheep to larger, faster-growing commercial crosses. By now, it was more cost- and time-effective to buy in ready-spun and ready-dyed wool, which offered a vast array of colours with which to knit Fair Isle garments and accessories.In 2020 I started breeding pure Shetland sheep and re-visited the tradition of getting the fleeces from my own sheep spun into wool which I then sell to support the croft and also use in my knitwear designs, though relying on Jamieson’s of Shetland’s 200+ colours of wool for colours outside of the ‘natural’ spectrum!