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Winter Project #1 - additions to the online shop
Now that the 2013 wool season has died down and Shetland Wool Week has passed for another year we have time to gather our thoughts in what is a slightly quieter time of the year at J&S. This also means we can work on a variety of exciting projects to bring you new products and patterns that use our lovely Real Shetland Wool. The first of these has been sorting through our cones of yarn and getting our Shetland Aran and Shetland Heritage cones on our online shop.The Shetland Aran comes in either 500g or 1kg cones which are equivalent to either 10 or 20 balls and the Shetland Heritage comes in 1kg cones which are equivalent to 40 balls. Buying cones gives you a huge saving of 40% for Shetland Aran and 61% for Shetland Heritage to the equivalent weight of balls of yarn. So for larger projects or if you are a regular knitter this is a great option for you. We only take in a limited amount of cones with each batch of yarn produced so to prevent disappointment get yours early before they run out. You can find Shetland Aran cones here, Shetland Heritage cones here and an updated Jumper Weight cones page here, scrolling down each page to get the full range.
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Wool Week Day 5 - Friday!
Wool Week day 5 has come and gone, today was so busy in the shop i didnt get as many photos as i liked but in the morning we had an advanced lace class with Mary Kay. Mary is a brilliant hand spinner and knitter and she brought lots of examples to show the ladies in the class. She quickly got everybody knitting and the concentration quietness set in.. All day the shop was very busy, we had visits from lots of people in their fancy Fair Isle! I love Felicity's face in this picture! These two ladies arrived in their lovely jumpers. We also met Felipe from Brazil who handknitted his jumper. He used an all-over from the Shetland Museum photo collection as inspiration. We were all very interested in his oxter (armpit) gussets! While all this was going on we had a darning masterclass with the brilliant Tom van Deijnen aka Tom Of Holland. He brought so much great stuff with him, I kept trying to go over and take some pictures but customers come first! You can read more about the kind of things Tom teaches and his passions on his blog here. Tom had lots of darning mushrooms and knitted fabric for people to practice on. Since we sell and are passionate about handmade woollen products Toms vision is definitely in line with our own and it was really interesting to see how he is bringing back the older techniques. Tomorrow there are still lots of things going on, including the Shetland Flock Book Fine Fleece Prize Giving which will be happening up at the Marts in Lerwick and the Makers Market in the Town Hall. I will be holding the fort at the shop until lunchtime then I'm hoping to get out and see some things so there might be another blog post tomorrow. Until then, happy knitting! Ella x
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Wool Week Day 4 - Thursday!
It was a bit of a quieter day in the shop today. In the morning we had a needlefelting class with the lovely Rosalynn Fraser of Rolo, she brought a huge amount of needles, sponges and a huge range of stuff for the ladies to attach their felted creations to.. Before long everybody was stabbing away, it certainly looked like a good stress reliever! We had a few peerie stabs to the finger but luckily our office manager June is a first aider so she came armed with plasters. By the end everyone had made something that looked great, a few of them even left wearing brooches they had made! In the afternoon we had no classes but i thought id get some photos of Oliver's talk. Every day this week Oliver, the manager and head wool man at J&S, has been giving a demonstration of the Wool grading and sorting him, Stuart and Derek do. Oliver's knowledge and skills are invaluable and its always interesting to hear him speaking about Shetland Wool! (Especially in his snazzy handknitted hat by Sandra.) He went through all the different grades, from Superfine to Grade 4, Superfine being the softest and Grade 4 being the roughest. We use every grade in J&S products, no wool is wasted! Tomorrow we have one of Shetland's best knitters Mary Kay giving a lace class in the morning and the wonderful Tom of Holland giving a darning masterclass in the afternoon. It's bound to be an interesting day! Wool Week may be coming to an end but tomorrow night the North Atlantic Sheep and Wool Conference kicks off, you can read more about it here. See you tomorrow, happy knitting! x
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Wool Week Day 3 - Wednesday
I cant believe we are half way through the week already! Today we had another brilliant Fair Isle Class with Hazel Tindall As the rain poured outside the ladies chose two colours and got started with their knitting. Hazel gave them a chart and they could choose to knit a wristwarmer or a skinny scarf. She also brought in some examples of her Fair Isle knitting for us to see And the quiet set in as they all began to concentrate.. At the end of the class there was a great start to the knitting for the class members to take away and add to. In the afternoon we had a visit from the Whalsay Bairns Knitting Club, we first met the girls when they came to visit us a few months ago to be filmed for the BBC. The group consists of about 10 or so young girls who have a knitting club at their school in Whalsay at lunchtimes and after school. There have been various photographers and camera crews in this week and today was no different. Some of the girls even had a go! A lot of the girls were working on Fair Isle Yoke jumpers and cardigans or hats. You could see how good their skills were and it was inspiring to see. As we said in the previous blog post about them, they are Shetland's future knitters! This is the lasses with their teacher Amanda who organises their knitting club. Her passion and skills are all being past onto the girls and long may it continue! Tomorrow we have a bit of Needle felting in the morning and a free afternoon to catch up on our orders and hopefully see more visitors, til then.. happy knitting! x
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Wool Week Day 2 - Tuesday
Today we had one of the classes i was most excited to see, a spinning class! Sue from the Shetland Guild of Spinners, Weavers, Knitters and Dyers came to the shop and we had a small class due to the space but also so the ladies could get some good one on one teaching Sue did a bit of demonstration, but pretty soon they dived right in, they all had a bag of Shetland Combed tops to try out which meant they could just get going and try it out! Me and Sandra had lots to do but kept having a look to see how the ladies were getting on, it looked very therapeutic! Alongside the many knitters in the shop we also had a visit from a group which were on a Field Farm Tour, which is a group that takes Farmers and people involved in the agricultural sector on tours all over the world, and this week they are in Shetland. Oliver gave them a tour and told them all about what we do at J&S. It was great to have so many people in the shop who may do totally different things but they are all supporting Crofting and in turn Wool production. A couple from the group presented Oliver with a piece of traditional Northern Irish pottery, Reggie and Ruth gave the set to Oliver as a thank you for his talk, which was really nice of them! In the afternoon, Elizabeth Johnston from Shetland Handspun came to give a class on Shetland Lace, she talked about history and techniques and this class was a bit quieter than the others, i think there was a lot of concentrating! all the ladies were helping and encouraging each other So that was today, there is a great buzz around the shop and with so much stuff going on all over Shetland, especially in Lerwick its a good time to be a knitter in Shetland! see you tomorrow! happy knitting x
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Wool Week Day 1 - Monday
Shetland Wool Week has begun! the shelves were stocked.. and Jamie Smith, our mascot (aka Sheep Cushion) was waiting for some woolly friends to arrive.. and arrive they did! We began our Wool Week classes with a Colour knitting with Hazel Tindall, who brought some of her knitting to show the ladies and then had them choose a few colours and with lots of Hazels 'peerie cloos' (little balls) to try a bit of colour knitting it looked very fun and the finished pieces looked lovely! in the afternoon Mary Henderson, who we met at Wool Week last year, gave a class all about Steeking! the class was centered around knitting a Mug Hug, and Mary focused the end of the class on steeking the knitting.. cutting up your knitting can be scary but Mary made it look easy. all day the shop was full of customers even though the rain was lashing down outside, and this evening we went to the Wool Week opening ceremony which was to launch a new book about Shetland textiles, available from the Museum Shop, and our fiddle tune competition 'The Gansey' won by Thomas Stove. Two musicians gladly came and played the tune for us which was lovely, the tune was inspired by the composers mothers knitting needles and you could really tell, there were lots of people videoing it so hopefully we'll get to see it! all in all, a good first day so have a look again tomorrow to see whats been happening at J&S. happy knitting x
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Wool Week 2013
So Wool Week 2013 kicks off on Monday! We have been busy getting the shop ready and tidied for the invasion of wool lovers, and its hard to believe its been a whole year since the last one. This year again we have lots of classes in the shop and expect to see lots of pictures through the week! If you would like to see the programme you can view it online here, there are still places available on the North Atlantic Sheep and Wool Conference which kicks off right after Wool Week, if your interested in that you can read more about it here. It will be a very busy week in the shop so if you place an order on our online shop there may be a bit of a delay in it getting dispatched, thank you for bearing with us as always and to make up for it we will try and fill the blog with lots of inspiring pictures for you! We will be trying to blog every day next week so keep checking back to see whats happening at Jamieson & Smith. Happy Knitting x
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In The Loop 3.5
Shetland is very lucky in that our strong textiles culture means lots of textiley things happen here, and last week Shetland was host to the In the Loop 3.5 Textile Conference as part of the International Textile Festival. In The Loop was developed by Linda Newington who is the Head Librarian at the Winchester School of Art, in 2010 Shetland was the host of In the Loop 2 which was organised by Linda together with Dr Carol Christiansen, the Shetland Museum Curator. In the Loop 3.5 had a Nordic theme and the conference featured 3 days of talks by academics, knitters, students, artists and many more. I couldn't go into detail about all the talks but I thought id pick out a few, you can see a short description about all the speakers here. Kerstin Lindstrom is an artist with an interest in parcipative art, and in her talk she spoke about her piece 'Own Our Own Time' which involved a group of 80 knitters together in a circle to reflect on the passage of time, it was originally organised in Faroe in 2011. On Thursday the piece was added to by Shetlanders and visitors at the Bod of Gremista I took these pictures at the event, while knitting! the green wool we were knitting with was Jamieson & Smith Heritage in the colour Moss Green. It was a chilly night but we knitted for an hour or so adding to the piece, it was quite clever how it was done, you knitted with one end of one circular needle on your left and the other end of another circular needle on the right so the knitting was continually moving around. On Thursday Roxane Permar gave a talk on Public Art and Knitting in Shetland which covered public art work she has done in Shetland, i know Roxane as she is a Lecturer on the Textiles course at the Shetland College where i studied, but it was really interesting to hear about her work over the years, including the controversial Croft Cosy Project she developed in Shetland in the early 1990's. The project plan was to handknit a cover to go over a traditional Shetland Croft House and she spoke about the positive and negative reactions the project had. Also on Thursday morning Oliver, the manager and top wool man at Jamieson & Smith gave a talk entitled 'Shetland Wool in the 21st Century' Quite a wide topic! He focused on the projects and partnerships we are involved with at J&S, such as the Fine Lace Project and Heritage Yarns with the Shetland Museum and Amenity Trust and the wide range of products made with Shetland Wool at the Real Shetland Company. On Thursday afternoon Elizabeth Johnston gave a really interesting talk about Fair Isle Yoke Jumpers and Cardigans and how they have come back into fashion. She showed us lots of photos of her family and relatives in Fair Isle Yokes over the years and told us that her granddaughter had asked her to make her a yoke. Elizabeth said she hated making yokes when she was knitting them in her youth, and it really made me think about how when something is in fashion you don't think about the people making the item and how they probably are not glad they are in fashion! The finished yoke she made for Callie, her granddaughter, was made completely in handspun and hand dyed wool which is Elizabeth's specialty and she had the finished yoke with her, it was so lovely. Elizabeth had contacted me before the conference and asked if she could feature my yoke cardigan in her talk which was made by Sandra, and of course I agreed. The main shade is Jumper Weight Shade FC38 and one of my favourites! I get a lot of compliments on it, and i will still wear it, even if yokes go out of fashion! Friday featured some of my favourite talks, Emily Watts recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, we met Emily last year when she came to Shetland to research for her dissertation, and we sponsored some of her final show work which was all made using British Wool, she focused her talk on her trips to Shetland and a small Norwegian town called Svalbard and how it inspired her final collection. Annemor Sundbo gave a very inspiring talk, she ran one of the last shoddy factories in Norway which made blankets and quilts from recycled knitwear, and she began to find and sort all the beautiful knitted textiles, saving them from the rag pile If you can i would look at the list of speakers and have a read about some of their work, it made for a very inspiring few days and it was brilliant to see how many people came up to Shetland especially for the Conference. It makes me excited for Wool Week! Happy Knitting! Ella
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Jamieson & Smith at the Voe Show
On Saturday Me (Ella), Sandra and Oliver headed up north to Judge at the annual Voe Show. Oliver was judging the wool and me and Sandra were judging the Knitting, in particular the Colour Box Competition. For the past few years we have chosen a range of eight colours from our 2 ply Jumper Weight and the challenge is to create something using at least 4 of the colours. There was a brilliant and wide range of items made, from all overs to socks and from headbands to dolls! We were so pleased with the amount of entries and the skill. There were also some entries from the Whalsay bairns in the children's categories We chose this cardigan as our Trophy winner, we loved the use of pattern and colour, you can see it on Ravelry here. After we had finished our section we went around to help with the rest of the knitting judging. We then met back up with Oliver who had been judging the wool. As well as judging the wool, Oliver was also given the hard task of judging the overall Champion from the winners in all the animal categories, there was a lot to choose from including this lovely Coo and peerie Kitten. Heres Oliver and Sandra discussing the merits of the winning hen.. In the end though Oliver decided to go for this lovely Sheepdog. A worthy winner I think. All in all, we had a great day at the Voe Show!
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