When you grow up in the Hebrides among your tough Harris Tweed-clad menfolk and the smell of wet tweed and feel of rough wool is as familiar to you as your own skin you have permission to mess with it.
The ancient coming together of our island sheep wool in woven and knitted form is an eternal delight for the senses.
In tiny stone homes folk carded the wool and spun it making threads that bound communities of hand knitters and weavers in industry and clothed, as it turned out, the world.
Slamming Harris Tweed fabric up against Harris wool or any other pure wool feels natural.
To be wild with it; to let the ragged edges show, bare, to cut it imperfectly, to cherish tiny pieces of fibres and let them sing a different tune feels like an evolution of our Hebridean spirit.
As an indigenous Hebridean woman taught a traditional craft of our people, playing with our natural fibres makes my heart sing.
“And a bird overhead sang Follow,And a bird to the right sang Here;And the arch of the leaves was hollow,And the meaning of May was clear.”~Algernon Charles Swinburne~ The dawn chorus of robin and song thrush, blackbird and wren. The sweet scent of gorse on the breeze. The clear blue of wild bluebells and a …
As we are all part of nature we feel the quickening in early Spring, a tingling of life force awakening inside us, a desire to rampage into newness. I wonder if like the sap in plant stems that is suddenly rising and full of vigour, we too have this response in our bodies. All things …
All is on the wane here; the long grass falls dry and soft yellow, sunlight is dimmed in the morning, the wind is colder. At the same time the bramble berries are bursting with plump ripeness and the Rowan berries shine red in the twilight as crows squawk in delight at them. We fall into …
As familiar as skin: Harris Tweed
When you grow up in the Hebrides among your tough Harris Tweed-clad menfolk and the smell of wet tweed and feel of rough wool is as familiar to you as your own skin you have permission to mess with it.
The ancient coming together of our island sheep wool in woven and knitted form is an eternal delight for the senses.
In tiny stone homes folk carded the wool and spun it making threads that bound communities of hand knitters and weavers in industry and clothed, as it turned out, the world.
Slamming Harris Tweed fabric up against Harris wool or any other pure wool feels natural.
To be wild with it; to let the ragged edges show, bare, to cut it imperfectly, to cherish tiny pieces of fibres and let them sing a different tune feels like an evolution of our Hebridean spirit.
As an indigenous Hebridean woman taught a traditional craft of our people, playing with our natural fibres makes my heart sing.
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