It’s good that I have photos to look back on to recall all that happened on our trip. Every day was so full of adventure that it gets all mushed together. The Scottish Blackface, however, were everywhere we went, so are hard to forget. We got really good at dodging them on the narrow roads when they took it upon themselves to cross just about the same time as we were passing them.
After our visits to weavers we took the ferry from Harris to Uist in search of local yarn. We had two places to visit, but finding few places to stay, ended up “glamping.” In fact, this was just like a little self-catering hotel room, only we were just by ourselves in the middle of a field. As you can see, we remain completely inept at the selfie. Our glamping “pod,” however was quite fine and didn’t seem at all like camping.
I can’t say enough good things about Meg Rodger and her locally sourced yarns of the Birlinn Yarn Company on the tiny island of Berneray. Her dark, peaty brown is the fine fleece of her Hebridean sheep. She has been selectively breeding her sheep to favor softness, and the result is obvious when you handle and compare her Hebridean yarn to others. Her dyed colors (all natural dyes) are on a base of local Cheviot.
Meg is modeling two of her designs. The headband — Myrtle Headband — is named for family friend and intrepid explorer, Myrtle Simpson. Hearing a bit about her made me want to knit one for my next cold weather adventure.
I chose a different colorway than the one from the pattern — one based on the dark brown Hebridean yarn, with the natural white Cheviot as the background, and dyed colors Field Poppy red and a soft green for the stranded pattern. Don’t be fooled by the red haze around the designs — it isn’t bleed, but rather the color strands showing through the white background (my stitches are too loose).
This is a quick knit, and worked on a slightly larger-than-usual needle size for color work (US 6/4.0mm), would be ideal as a first stranded project for beginners.
Meg is an extremely talented visual artist with many interests. Her works of art include graphics that harness the wild, natural elements of the Hebrides. Working with rather than against the constant wind has allowed her to produce a series of “wind drawings” that document a specific day, time, and weather. Each are named for that day’s shipping forecast.
You don’t need to spend a great deal of time in the Outer Hebrides to quickly realize just how important the weather is to daily life. In trying to return from Uist to Lewis to catch an outbound flight back to the mainland, 3 ferries in a row were cancelled due to wind and rough seas. You need to be very flexible in traveling there.
Megs work is both intentional and highly personal. At the same time, it is thoughtful and introspective. She is very aware of the Viking heritage of the islands, and pays tribute to that in a number of ways. The name of her company, Birlinn Yarn, is the name of the Hebridean adaptation of the Viking long boat.
“The birlinn was clinker-built and could be sailed or rowed. It had a single mast with a square sail. Smaller vessels of this type might have had as few as twelve oars, with the larger West Highland galley having as many as forty. For over four hundred years, down to the seventeenth century, the birlinn was the dominant vessel in the Hebrides.”
.png){kind=link}
She also refers to her sheep as “seafaring” again a nod to the ancient breeds brought by the Norse invaders (later settlers) who are, to this day, transported to islands off the coast of Harris for the summer, to provide additional/different nutrients to their diet.
Meg’s careful husbandry produces a unique Hebridean yarn. It is unusually soft, and because she also very methodically selects the very best of the fleece that she grades herself, guarantees a yarn free of the wiry outer coat. Even though she selects particularly good fleece from neighbors, you can imagine that this is a daunting task. She needs to collect 750 kilos of fleece to send to the mill for a single spin, and that represents fleece from 800-900 sheep.
It didn’t surprise me at all that Meg became intrigued by the story of Auŏur the Deep Minded, also sometimes written as Aud.
Auŏur was a Norse princess, who after her husband (Olaf the White — self-styled King of Dublin) was killed, moved with her son to the Hebrides. There her son married and had 6 daughters and a son. After her son’s death, she gathered the remainder of her family, and with a crew of 20 men, including thralls (men taken as slaves), sailed to Iceland. There she claimed a significant amount of land, and set the thralls free with land for farming.
Auŏur was an unusual woman for her time, a warrior leader with unusual power and wealth who was able to save her family and move on to prosper in a new land.
In 2019, Meg went to Iceland to both study the husbandry of sheep there, and the textiles in the Textile Center in Blönduós as a textile artist in residence. Her aim was not only to bring to light the Norse heritage of the Hebrides, but to find a way to honor the unique and inspiring story of Auŏur, tying it to her own life and the North Atlantic sheep breeds. She felt the best way to do that was to weave a vararfeldur, a Viking cloak of the type you see above (left).
To do that, she needed to learn to weave on a warp-weighted loom. For that, she traveled to learn form warp weighted loom experts at Osterøy Museum, near Bergen in Norway. That story and her journey to realize her dream can be found on her blog here.
As part of her exhibition, Meg has shared this cloak with other women who have been touched by Auŏur’s story. I was honored that she also chose to share it with me.
Ganseys
Meg was finishing up a lovely gansey sweater for her son, prompting me to ask questions about the gansey tradition in the Hebrides.
Elaborate gansey designs are attributed to the Island of Eriskay, where many of the “Herring Girls” were working. These were the women who followed the fishing fleet and were responsible for gutting, salting, and packing the catch going to market. Knitting at spare moments, these women produced both simple, and heavily patterned sweaters worn by the fishermen.
The bulk of herring fishing was centered around Eriskay and Barra to the south. Most of the herring fisherman from the Hebrides worked only part-time as fisherman because they also worked their crofts. If we assume that the women of their families remained behind on the crofts rather than joining the the seasonal fishermen, they wouldn’t have had as much exposure to the gansey patterns as other women along the coastline.
Many of the fishermen in the northern Hebrides were “creel” rather than “net” fisherman. The men who fished with the basket-like trap called a creel were fishing for lobster rather than herring. This is still a widely practiced fishing style in the Hebrides and further supports the idea that the Hebridean women didn’t have that much contact with the Herring Girls.
In addition to lobster, large white fish, like cod, were plentiful along the northern coasts of the Hebrides, providing another source of food and income apart from the herring.
By Ross, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13367621
Ganseys deserve a much larger discussion, as does the story of how fishing may or may not have shaped knitting in the Hebrides. I’ll save that for another time.
Another Yarn
I’ve had an opportunity to write a little about Uist Wool from the spinning mill in North Uist. I used their Canach (cottongrass) in the “oat” color, a 100% Shetland wool, for one of the models for a pair of socks designed for the Journal of Scottish Yarn (due to be published this month). While “cottongrass” refers to a common plant on the islands, it actually has a hand very similar to un-mercerized, loosely spun cotton. I enjoyed working with this yarn. Even though the yarn is soft, it held the Bavarian twisted stitches in firm relief that you would expect from a more tightly spun yarn. I absolutely would make a sweater from this yarn, and would love its soft, lofty feel.
The sock facing forward is in the Uist Wool, while the darker brown is Westcroft Shetland.
The Uist Wool Mill was born in 2013 by a local group eager to celebrate the lovely variety of wools on the islands and provide an economic boost to the community by providing a fair price to the crofters for their wool.
In addition to learning the wool business from the ground up, the mill’s founders also chose to bring in heritage machinery from Yorkshire and Argyll and lovingly restore it, rather than purchasing a mini-mill as some others have done. Their story can be found on their website here.
I brought back 3 different wools from the mill. More Cranach in the sansass (whisper) color; a tweedy brown with small slubs of white here and there. It has the same squishy feel as the yarn used for the socks, so am looking forward to using it (when I get a break to make something just for me!).
The other two yarns are a heavier 4-ply, one in natural white (Cheviot) and one in rich, dark brown (Hebridean). I also brought back a pattern for a gansey-inspired cowl that is currently on my needles. Working with the pattern and Hebridean makes me extremely glad this isn’t a sweater! At his point, the patterning is very difficult to see because of the dark color, so is a bit of a problem if I make a mistake. I’m undecided about my choice of garment for the yarn at this point, but will reserve judgement until it’s done and blocked. What I can say about the yarn is that it’s a bit more rustic feeling than I had hoped based on my experience with the Berlinn yarn of the same type. It is my observation that the Uist Hebridean wool is a little more inclusive of outer coat, and you can see that to some degree in little hairs poking out here and there in the wool. It also exhibits the one gripe I often have with small mill production — unevenness in the spin and ply. There are enough thin spots to make me a little cranky, and I almost wished I’d gone down a needle size and added stitches to make the right diameter for the pattern. I don’t think the thinner spots will show strongly because of the overall texture of the cowl, but I might be concerned about the same yarn in a stockinette sweater unless knit at a compact gauge.
I will review the Solas yarn in an upcoming blog, but there is still more I’d like to say about Uist Mill. While it isn’t evident in their information about the mill, I would like to point out that much of what they have done has been accomplished relying heavily on volunteer labor. The mill is first and foremost a labor of love, and the result is evident in their products. They have thought carefully about their products, and have chosen to keep their offerings to the natural shades of the many varieties of sheep produced in the Hebrides rather than introducing dyes. The factory is community-based, and its reliance on that community and its support makes Uist Wool what it is.
Throughout the Hebrides, I saw over and over the results of the members of somewhat isolated communities come together to keep business going through volunteer labor support. Their desire to succeed is tightly bound to the success of the entire community, and they all take that responsibility very seriously. While I see evidence of that spirt now and again here in the US, it generally only happens after a disaster or other catastrophe, fades quickly, and isn’t embedded in our contemporary culture. I have heart-felt admiration for what is happening at Uist Wool, and absolutely cheer each success. I have no doubt that it will continue and grow. While I might quibble with this or that, they do, in fact, make high quality yarn. You would not go wrong to choose some for your next project.
Leaving the Hebrides…
We left Stornoway with so much to think about and such full and satisfying memories. I would love to return someday with hopes that there are still people seeing the special qualities of those islands and deciding that is where they want to be. The strength and resolve I saw there were truly inspiring.
So until the next time, keep calm and craft on.
Thanks for the great rea Sara!