Shetland Wool Week

 quote: :"Shetland Wool Week is a world renowned celebration of Britain’s most northerly native sheep, the Shetland textile industry and the rural farming community on these islands...Since its conception fourteen years ago, Shetland Wool Week has grown into an internationally acclaimed event. Throughout the week there are an extensive range of exhibitions, classes and events, which will cover many different subjects. ...Events take place from the most southern tip of the Shetland, right up to the most northerly island of Unst, famous for its beautiful lacework, with many locations in between." unquote.

Shetland Wool Week (or SWW) is something I've been meaning to go to for years but the timing never seemed right. Also it isn't easy to get to, being in the far north. I almost went before COVID, even getting as far as buying a pair of waterproof trousers after reading about the horizontal rain and constant wind.  So SWW was high up on my retirement bucket list and 2023 was the year I finally went.  The events of the week run from Saturday through to the following Sunday, but as the programme isn't released until a few months before and yet you have to book accommodation a year ahead, I had booked to be in Lerwick for 12 nights just in case.  So that's why there was no blog the past two weekends, as I was up north with only my phone. Travelling took up a full long day each way: train to Birmingham, flight to Aberdeen then a layover, and another flight to Sumburgh airport on Shetland which is 25 miles or so out of Lerwick.  As I don't drive any more, I was staying at a small hotel in Lerwick itself.  But I managed to book several of the bus tours offered during the event and eventually saw most of the main islands apart from Unst.

It was a great week!  The camaraderie amongst participants (some 600 for event bookings and many more friends and partners, and people just hanging out) reminded me of the early years of the Paducah quilt festival: everyone in a good mood, everyone enjoying their week, lots of creative inspiration and gorgeous knitware being worn, you ended up chatting to strangers everywhere or even sharing their table for dinner or their car for a lift. The Shetlanders themselves gave us a warm welcome, they seem to love having the SWW every year and lots of shops and communities were doing special exhibitions of traditional knitting for  visitors to see. 

Shop window display

Early in the week I visited the Jamiesons shop, the Jamiesons & Smith Wool Brokers (a different company despite the name), and the Loose Ends knitting shop. I managed to secure shade cards for both Jamiesons' shops so no more guessing from online pictures of Spindrift or jumperweight.

Knitwear for sale in Loose Ends

I spent a lot of time at the Shetland Museum in Lerwick, both to enjoy the exhibits and some booked talks and a music evening, but also just relaxing and knitting in the knitters 'Hub'.

Historic knitwear on display

Entrance to the Hub (above) and inside (below)

I took tours of the South mainland, the North mainland, Yell, Whalsay, Uradale Farm in Scalloway and the Jamiesons factory in Sandness, so I saw a lot of the magnificent scenery and coastline.  Lots of sheep, lots of Shetland ponies, some highland cattle and even some seals. Many of the tour guides referenced the 'Shetland' TV series which I had never seen (we've started watching it now I'm back) and one guide had even been an extra - playing 'angry villager'. I have to say that having grown up in a heavily forested part of the world, I don't find the open heather moors and miles of empty peat bog to be beautiful as such, but it is striking. I did love the coastlines and if you come earlier in the year you can see puffins and lots of other sea birds. I was a bit surprised to learn that Shetland is actually very affluent - they get a lot of money from the pelagic fishing fleet, the cruise ships, the oil industry and of course tourism.  The hotel where I stayed the last night, the proprietor had a Jag sitting on his drive with a personalised numberplate. The cost of living is high, probably because so much has to be imported, so prices were high for example in restaurants, and houses appeared to cost the same if not more as where I live.

We were lucky with the weather: although it was almost always windy, it was never the Force 9 gales they had last year. Weather stayed relatively warm at 12-14 degrees C, and although there were many sudden showers of rain, they were generally light. So I lived in my raincoat, hat and quick dry trousers the whole time, but didn't need my waterproof trousers after all.

I took one class on blocking knitwear which was quite interesting, and I ended up investing in some glove boards and a jumper stretching frame like this one. I've already used mine to dry the acrylic cardigan I wore on the plane after washing it.

The knitwear on show was amazing, loads of people wearing their creations.  I took a few things to wear but generally I find handknits too hot to wear indoors.

Just before I went, I had started clearing out my knitting room and bagging up no-longer-wanted yarn for sale or to give away, so I was trying hard not to buy more in Shetland. Of course a few things crept into my luggage.

Shade cards for both shops, a couple of project bags, a weird pen-shaped scissors, and yarn to knit a pair of fair-isle wrist warmers (pattern from Little Cotton Rabbits)

A pin cushion

Genuine Shetland hat and gloves bought at one of the community sales that we visited, and a greeting card with mini Shetland lace on it

Obligatory tea towel (got one for the MiL as well), a bag recycled from fair isle knitting, and a cushion cover sewn from tweeds into a Shetland scene

From Urudale Farm, I bought a pattern for handwarmers and three balls of their own yarn.  During the week I was able to knit the body of both handwarmers but I think I am going to add some fingers.

I also bought several traditional patterns including one for a yoked cardigan (Hairst Yoke by Sandra Manson)- so while I was there, I chose yarn for the cardigan.

It is recommended to purchase membership of the SWW early on, so that you get an advance look at the programme when it is released and can plan your attack for the subsequent ticket selling bloodbath.  But you also get a cool membership set which I picked up at the Hub while I was there. The hat motif is this year's SWW hat pattern.

All in all, it was a pretty good week.  Many people go every year - I met one woman who had been 11 times.  Most people rent cars so that they can get around easily and book nicer accommodation outside of Lerwick. I feel like I 'did' the event pretty thoroughly so I don't know that I would go back again, at least not for a while. As a non-driver, I would only end up booking the same tours again unless I could entice DH to come along and act as chauffeur.

And breathe...

Yesterday was a day of chaos, and surprisingly exhausting.  The two fitters turned up promptly to replace our eleven failed windows, and the first surprise was that they wanted internal access to all the windows. The estimator had implied that it would all be done from the outside, so we had only cleared windowsills in preparation.  In between explaining to them which were the failed windows on various floors (I had to draw 'X' on panes with sharpie marker), I had to hurriedly clear internal access  with DH's help.  This was difficult in rooms full of clutter like the attic storage room and the former knitting room (chock a block with all the stuff I cleared out of the adjoining room to create space for my long arm), and my office. In fact we got so carried away that we hurriedly cleared away in front of my sewing room window, only to realise later that window wasn't being worked on!  However that did reveal a terrible amount of dust bunnies and unneeded clutter so more stuff to get rid of.

So we had a day of various windows disappearing in a flurry of hammering and dust cloths, men coming in and out, the noise chasing me from room to room.  Even the estimator unexpectedly returned unannounced via the back door and surprised me when I ran into him upstairs. Meanwhile the normal builder turned up and needed various windows opened for painting and also our driveway door - which  ended up having to stand open the rest of the day due to wet paint - which was rather nervewracking as it opens onto the road although we put plywood across it.  To add to all of this, the broadband suddenly went out mid-morning while DH was in a work meeting - a BT crew had started a few hours of work on the pole in front of our house. A Facebook purchaser came to collect another bit of stuff I was selling, the car had to go in to the shop for a few hours, I was making so many cups of tea for people that we ran out of milk and I had to run out for some more...  By the end of the day I was exhausted. Meanwhile DH was holed up in the spare room trying to work amidst all the noise, which was difficult but I think less stressful. Even the cat was hiding for most of the day. Then after they had gone, came the hoovering up of construction bits and putting things back where they belong.

no window!

So today we are gratefully enjoying a quiet house that noone is coming into (although I am expecting a few Facebook buyers shortly). Also it has cooled right down to more normal autumn temperatures which is a relief.

I haven't had time for much crafting this week, apart from evening embroidery on the vintage embroidered quilt blocks that I started in Japan. I have been working on creating a little cylinder-shaped fabric box with laced-on wooden ends. I bought the wood discs at Festival of Quilts last year, the stall that was selling them also had attractive kits for redwork inserts but I have used some special sampler-style linen that I bought from Jane Greenoff. I didn't have a pattern so it took a little while to get the circumference right. I've stiffened the fabric with Bosal foam and will sew on a magnetic closure. I sewed a little pocket at the back and I may add some felt inside the little for needle storage.

I spent a lot of time this week working on my Round the World trip scrapbook until my printer ran out of ink forcing me to stop until more ink arrives.  I suppose in some sense it's a waste of time, nobody else cares. But it's actually been somewhat cathartic, and also a bit of an enjoyable puzzle hunt to piece together what I was doing 35 years ago - it's brought back a lot of memories. Not so much of what I saw, but of how I felt then and the wanderlust I used to have. It makes me feel more motivated to work on my planning for my New Zealand trip next year.  I had fully intended to do a lot more world travelling, but then I came back to the UK and met DH and somehow life happened. It's nice to be retired and get a second chance.

Decluttering makes me happy and sad this week

 I'm feeling a bit sad today because DH is just taking most of the bits of my old quilt frame off to the dump. It was such a fabulous thing for me when I got it secondhand around 17 years ago and together we produced probably well over 50 quilts in two different houses. But it was tired, various pieces had failed and been replaced with bodges, my original bodges to the side frames were dodgy, my scaffolding pole reinforcements to the poles were failing - it's too old for any further support from Grace the manufacturers. So I had to accept that it just wasn't suitable for passing on to another quilter, it would cause them too much grief and they would be better off buying something newer.  On the positive side, it opens up a big wodge of space in my sewing room which I can certainly use to create more breathing space.

In a similar vein of old friends leaving for the dump, my Canon inkjet printer which was probably older than my adult son and had become extremely tempermental, has also gone to its final rest. It left a parting gift of a large gooey splodge of black ink which had apparently been leaking quietly out of the bottom of it for years.   I have replaced it with a new Canon which was suspiciously cheap but also includes a scanner.  The quality of the print jobs is so much better and faster.  

The new printer has facilitated me embarking on another declutter project which is to tackle my pile of ancient photo albums. I'm starting with two albums from my 'round the world' trip of 1988, full of faded photos back from the days when you had to send off a roll of film and had no idea what your pictures were like until long after you took them.  I didn't keep travel journals in those days, so the albums had no commentary apart from country names and the odd jotting on the back of a photo. However, as regular readers know, I spent a lot of time last year digitising my personal archives so now I have access to letters home and diary notes from the time period.  This is allowing me to tie together the commentary and the photos a little bit, and work out where I was and when.  The photos are not good quality in any case, so I'm just scanning some of them and printing them on regular paper to reduce bulk.  The result is going into some A5 notebooks I got on sale at Wilko (before they went into administration), which will have a lot more meaning and be a lot easier to store. I'm not trying to be artistic with the new book, it's taking many hours as it is.  But it is pretty cool to re-live my adventures of 35 years ago, when I was thinner, stronger, more intrepid, and had so much more energy.

Old albums (left) and new A5 book (right and below)

Back in 1988, fed up with my life in Canada, I put everything into storage and came to London on a working holidaymaker visa in June.  I did secretarial work for 3 months in London while sightseeing in the UK, then travelled via Paris, Venice and Istanbul to join an overland tour in Egypt for two weeks. Then I did a two week coach tour in Israel, then went back to Cairo to join another Encounter Overland camping trip from Cairo to Kathmandu.  I did a bit of solo travel in Rajasthan, then flew back to Canada via Singapore in March of 89.  It all seems so long ago now, and you wonder how it was even possible in the pre-internet days.  I used to pick up letters from home at Poste Restante bureaus in various cities, and I carried around various printed guidebooks, ripping out whole countries once I was finished with them to reduce the weight. And I was living out of a backpack, although most of the time I was also hauling an additional duffle bag with all my purchased treasures which I would periodically mail home. Once a hoarder, always a hoarder :) I still have the two cross-stitch pictures that I worked on the trip, stitching away on long drives in the back of the overland truck.

This week I've also been selling some decorative clutter on Facebook marketplace, sending some of my past finds off to new homes. This can be quite gratifying, as so far the buyers have been delighted with their acquisitions. A mother and daughter, the daughter will be taking my pretty vase with her to college. An older man who wanted my set of vintage soda bottles for the pub he built in his garden during COVID.

I finished sewing the binding on the sixth and final quilt, which I am calling Cottage Stars as I can't remember what I used to call it. This was a purportedly quick method of piecing stars using polygons which was a complete PITB to actually do, but I really like the end result.  Rather Brambly Hedge, I shall keep this one.

So now I just have four sandwiched quilts which weren't suitable for quilting on my old frame.  They might work on my new frame, but I have to build up my skill set first.  It's been too hot and I've been too busy to do much practicing yet. But I did order a cheap pegboard set from Rymans and hung it up to organise my new collection of longarm rulers.  Most of these came with the longarm, but four of the small ones I owned already thinking I would try to learn to use them on my domestic machine.

I've also broken apart the  (already loose) old hearth in front of the fireplace in the longarm room, that was in my way if I wanted to use pantographs. DH has kindly moved the massive pieces into the corner out of the way, and I've cleaned up all the rubble and broken mortar bits. So now I just need to find a new home for the yarn tree and the remaining yarn cones.  This house is starting to feel like one of those kid's games where you slide tiles around in a frame to make room for other tiles to move in their turn.

I completely finished the cross stitch bookmark and made it up, it looks good. I'm not a very neat cross-stitcher but pressing always improves the look. This was a free gift with World of Cross Stitching magazine, I think last autumn.

The big finish this week is the Christmas porch kit, now complete with a somewhat dubious snow effect which does not bear close inspection.This is what it looks like with the three sets of lights turned on: 3 porch lights, coloured lights along the railing, and clear lights in the garden tree.

The snow effect is initially a mixture of white 'snow' static grass that DH didn't want, glitter glue, PVA glue, white paint and some water.  Once that was dry, I went back in with clear glue and manually applied patches of dry white static grass to create more texture.  It was using what I had on hand, you could spend a lot more money for a more realistic result, but I think this does the job of creating a wintery mood. Thank you again to Anita for supplying some of the extra structural bits!

Other than that, this week has been all about the scaffolding: opening windows so the builder can paint them (which we have to leave open for hours, letting all the hot air into the house as it's been quite hot recently), discovering another failed window pane and having to organise its replacement, pulling out redundant cables from windows so the holes (and often surrounding rot) can be repaired, etc. Sometimes it feels like the builder is chasing me around the house: I'm about to go downstairs to my sewing room when I hear him letting himself into the basement to make tea or use facilities (I've set him up with a kettle and tea station downstairs), then once he leaves I go into my dollshouse room as it's furthest from where he is coming in/out only to have him start banging loudly on the dollshouse room window to pull rotten beads off, so I move to the sewing room and 10 minutes later he's outside the sewing room window painting the frame....  at least he is very industrious.  He's getting on well though so hopefully only a few more weeks. It needed to be done, some of the window frames were pretty bad and the seals were gone on the majority so it was only going to get worse.

'Oop North'

 We were away this past week in the caravan, travelling uncharacteristically far, up to a campsite on the Northumbrian coast near Alnwick.  We broke our journey each way with a night in Yorkshire: at Thirsk going up, and at Boroughbridge coming south.  In the north, we were camping in an AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) and it was lovely, particularly the unspoiled golden beach at Embleton Bay near our campsite. We had some lovely walks and were able to visit three castles in the week: Dunstanburgh, Bamburgh (of 'The Last Kingdom' TV fame) and Alnwick (now known for the Harry Potter scenes filmed there). DS kindly came and house-sat for us, since the house feels vulnerable now that all levels are accessible by scaffolding.

The small market town of Thirsk had some elaborate yarn bombing all over town, in the form of knitted hanging baskets themed to match the shops they were hanging in front of, eg. art shop, estate agent, butcher, craft shop etc.

The ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle

We walked to it and toured the ruins

Bamburgh Castle

Nicest from the outside as the interior was heavily rebuilt in

Victorian/Edwardian times

Alnwick Castle

We took the 'Film Locations' guided tour so I could fan-girl over the

Harry Potter locations. Also where the first BlackAdder series was filmed.

  

Boroughbridge, as it turns out, was the birthplace of Victorian explorer Isabella Bird. the Hall being the home of her maternal grandmother. I've read a few of her books and a biography. I suspect she was a rather annoying woman to know but there is no denying her fearless treading of paths not often taken by upperclass white women.

The coast with the sea in the distance

For leisure time in the caravan, I took along a wool felt kit by Corinne Lapierre to sew an embroidered felt cat.  The kit came with everything needed including stuffing.  Very cute.

I'm also close to finishing the cross stitch bookmark kit that I've been working on this summer during holidays. This was a free gift from a magazine.

So now it's back to scaffold-land.  The new double glazing panes are getting installed on the 15th, and then the following week I should be off to Shetland if all goes well (I've been reading worrying things about how often Logan Air cancels their island flights).