Shetland crafts and crofts
Jan. 10th, 2020 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI am shamed by helenraven's long at detailed post about her recent travels into dusting off and completing this one last post about our holiday in Shetland last summer. It has been a Work in Progress pretty much since June, and currently begins with a preamble added in July which contrasts the too-hot summer in which I was then writing with the cool, rainy Shetland I was writing about (that's easily deleted!). That contrast is typical of how the post was forming in my head, not so much a coherent nattative as a collection of odds and ends, this nad that, indoor and out, all chiming and echoing and making patterns ...
Well, then, the morning after our trip to Mousa,durham_rambler and I went to the Shetland Textile Museum, which is something new since our last visit to Shetland.
That is, the textile museum is new, though the building which houses it - the Böd of Gremista - was built in the eighteenth century as a fishing station. It also provided accommodation for the station manager, which is how it came to be the birthplace of Arthur Anderson, one of the founders of P & O and benefactor of what later became the Anderson High School. It looks a bit dreary, despite the attempt to brighten it up a bit with the jumpers on frames (this stretching process helps the finished item hold its shape, apparently) but that grey finish is typically Shetland: they don't do pretty. Even less pretty, but you can't see it from the photo is that the Bod sits right under the huge incinerator which takes Shetland's waste and turns it into electricity. It's brighter inside...
Inside, the museum is tiny, and quite idiosyncratic. It was set up by the Guild of Spinners Weavers and Dyers, with the private collection of one person at the heart of it. Two rooms downstairs house the shop - the best selection of knitwear I saw anywhere in Shetland - and a tweed loom, which there is just about space to squeeze round to look at the things displayed on the walls. Upstairs, one room is dedicated to Fair Isle knitting (not all of it from Fair Isle, the name describes the style) including a lady knitting, who seems to be making great progress despite her willingness to stop and chat, and the other houses the temorary exhibition - currently about Bess Jamieson, her collection and some of her work (she would spin anything, including qiviuq, which is muskox hair from the Canadian arctic). These are her tapestry bobbins:
I said this post didn't want to be an orderly narrative, but this journal also functions as my virtual memory, so I'll note, briefly, that we then went to the Shetland museum for lunch and a wander around; and that the following morningdurham_rambler and I went back to the jetty at Sandwick, where we had boarded the Mousa boat, to have a look at the display in the waiting room and a stroll along the coast - and were glad we had done so. But the next place that belongs in the crazy quilt of this post is the Croft House Museum:
The picture says it all, really: a tiny farmhouse in a beautiful location, you step through the door and turn one way into the house, the other (within the same building) into the barn:
It's much the same layout as the medieval farms we saw at Jarlshof, but this one is mid-nineteenth century (and was lived in until the 1960s).
We consulted the Craft Trail map ondurham_rambler's phone, and discovered we weren't far from a weaver called Just Shetland. That was all we knew, and if we had had the booklet with us, we would have seen they were open by appointment only, and been deterred. As it was, when we arrived - after an extremely beautiful drive, up the west coast of south Mainland - I was taken aback when we arrived, not at any sort of showroom, not even tacked on to the side of a house, but at the house itself. Julia and Stephen made us very welcome - for yes, another misapprehension: they are not 'just Shetland' as in trafition and simplicity, the are JuSt Shetland, as in Julia and Stephen. He programmes the looms with intricate patterns, and she weaves fine fabrics from wool but also from silm, and she has a taste for the brilliant colours of chemical dyes. The result is beautidul, and very far from my style. You can see some of Julia's scarves hanging at the left of this picture:
This is an exhibition of local craft work at the Bonhoga gallery, which we visited the next day, partly because Julia had told us she had some work in it, partly because it's always worth a visit. I'ce never seen anything exhibited there that I wanted enough to pay their prices for - not even, on this occasion, Bill Brown's ceramics (the bird's egg tea plates, not to mention the stylosed puffin jugs) but I usually stock up on cards in the shop. There's a gafé, too, if you're ready for refreshment, but we weren't. so instead we took a short walk along the mill race: before it was a gallery, this was
Weisdale Mill:
where the wild irises just coming into bloom; at this time of year (midsummer) on Lindisfarne, they'd be over. It makes a difference being above 60° north.
From here we turned back inti Lerwick, for lunch and shopping and the ferry home, all of which things were enough fun that this wasn't really, quite the end of the holiday. But it is the end of the post, and about time too.
helenraven's long at detailed post about her recent travels into dusting off and completing this one last post about our holiday in Shetland last summer. It has been a Work in Progress pretty much since June, and currently begins with a preamble added in July which contrasts the too-hot summer in which I was then writing with the cool, rainy Shetland I was writing about (that's easily deleted!). That contrast is typical of how the post was forming in my head, not so much a coherent nattative as a collection of odds and ends, this nad that, indoor and out, all chiming and echoing and making patterns ...Well, then, the morning after our trip to Mousa,
durham_rambler and I went to the Shetland Textile Museum, which is something new since our last visit to Shetland.That is, the textile museum is new, though the building which houses it - the Böd of Gremista - was built in the eighteenth century as a fishing station. It also provided accommodation for the station manager, which is how it came to be the birthplace of Arthur Anderson, one of the founders of P & O and benefactor of what later became the Anderson High School. It looks a bit dreary, despite the attempt to brighten it up a bit with the jumpers on frames (this stretching process helps the finished item hold its shape, apparently) but that grey finish is typically Shetland: they don't do pretty. Even less pretty, but you can't see it from the photo is that the Bod sits right under the huge incinerator which takes Shetland's waste and turns it into electricity. It's brighter inside...
Inside, the museum is tiny, and quite idiosyncratic. It was set up by the Guild of Spinners Weavers and Dyers, with the private collection of one person at the heart of it. Two rooms downstairs house the shop - the best selection of knitwear I saw anywhere in Shetland - and a tweed loom, which there is just about space to squeeze round to look at the things displayed on the walls. Upstairs, one room is dedicated to Fair Isle knitting (not all of it from Fair Isle, the name describes the style) including a lady knitting, who seems to be making great progress despite her willingness to stop and chat, and the other houses the temorary exhibition - currently about Bess Jamieson, her collection and some of her work (she would spin anything, including qiviuq, which is muskox hair from the Canadian arctic). These are her tapestry bobbins:
I said this post didn't want to be an orderly narrative, but this journal also functions as my virtual memory, so I'll note, briefly, that we then went to the Shetland museum for lunch and a wander around; and that the following morning
durham_rambler and I went back to the jetty at Sandwick, where we had boarded the Mousa boat, to have a look at the display in the waiting room and a stroll along the coast - and were glad we had done so. But the next place that belongs in the crazy quilt of this post is the Croft House Museum:The picture says it all, really: a tiny farmhouse in a beautiful location, you step through the door and turn one way into the house, the other (within the same building) into the barn:
It's much the same layout as the medieval farms we saw at Jarlshof, but this one is mid-nineteenth century (and was lived in until the 1960s).
We consulted the Craft Trail map on
durham_rambler's phone, and discovered we weren't far from a weaver called Just Shetland. That was all we knew, and if we had had the booklet with us, we would have seen they were open by appointment only, and been deterred. As it was, when we arrived - after an extremely beautiful drive, up the west coast of south Mainland - I was taken aback when we arrived, not at any sort of showroom, not even tacked on to the side of a house, but at the house itself. Julia and Stephen made us very welcome - for yes, another misapprehension: they are not 'just Shetland' as in trafition and simplicity, the are JuSt Shetland, as in Julia and Stephen. He programmes the looms with intricate patterns, and she weaves fine fabrics from wool but also from silm, and she has a taste for the brilliant colours of chemical dyes. The result is beautidul, and very far from my style. You can see some of Julia's scarves hanging at the left of this picture:<
This is an exhibition of local craft work at the Bonhoga gallery, which we visited the next day, partly because Julia had told us she had some work in it, partly because it's always worth a visit. I'ce never seen anything exhibited there that I wanted enough to pay their prices for - not even, on this occasion, Bill Brown's ceramics (the bird's egg tea plates, not to mention the stylosed puffin jugs) but I usually stock up on cards in the shop. There's a gafé, too, if you're ready for refreshment, but we weren't. so instead we took a short walk along the mill race: before it was a gallery, this was
Weisdale Mill:
where the wild irises just coming into bloom; at this time of year (midsummer) on Lindisfarne, they'd be over. It makes a difference being above 60° north.
From here we turned back inti Lerwick, for lunch and shopping and the ferry home, all of which things were enough fun that this wasn't really, quite the end of the holiday. But it is the end of the post, and about time too.
