The knitting belt is the first thing you notice. At the monthly gathering of the Skerry Knit Guild, held in a community hall on the west side of Shetland's main island, almost every member wears one: a leather pouch stuffed with horsehair, strapped around the waist, into which the end of a long steel needle is anchored. It frees one hand to work faster, and it is how islanders have made jumpers, shawls and gloves for generations. The quickest manage two hundred stitches a minute.
The guild was formed eight years ago by Ina Halcrow, a retired schoolteacher, and a dozen friends who worried that the islands' distinctive knitting traditions were fading. They began by teaching evening classes and selling a few garments at summer craft fairs. Today the cooperative has fifty-four members, aged from nineteen to ninety-one, and supplies hand-knitted pieces to a small number of carefully chosen designers in London, Paris and Tokyo.
Patterns carried in memory
The best-known local patterns are the bright bands of Fair Isle knitting, named after the tiny island between Shetland and Orkney, and the gossamer lace shawls once so fine they could be drawn through a wedding ring. Many of the older members learned these techniques as children, working from memory rather than written charts. Halcrow has made it a priority to record them, filling notebooks with patterns that had never been written down.
My grandmother never used a pattern in her life. She said the wool would tell you where it wanted to go. — Ina Halcrow
The wool itself is a point of pride. Shetland sheep are a small, hardy breed whose fleece comes in a remarkable range of natural shades, from creamy white to deep brown and silvery grey. The guild works almost entirely with local wool, spun at a small mill on the islands, and much of it is used undyed. The result is knitwear with a softness, warmth and subtle variation that machine-made pieces rarely match.
Interest from designers began, Halcrow says, with a single email from a London label asking whether the guild could produce twenty hand-knitted jumpers for a runway show. The pieces were a success, and requests multiplied. The guild now accepts only a handful of commissions a year, insists on fair pay for every hour of work and requires designers to credit the knitters by name. Its waiting list stretches well into next year.
For the younger members, knitting has become a meaningful source of income in a place where work can be scarce, and several combine it with fishing, crofting or tourism. For the older ones, it is a way of keeping the islands' culture alive and handing it on. The weekly gatherings are as much social occasions as working sessions, full of tea, gossip and the steady click of needles.
On the evening I visit, the wind is rattling the hall windows and rain is sweeping in off the Atlantic. Inside, a teenage member is working her first Fair Isle yoke, counting stitches under her breath while Halcrow watches over her shoulder. When the row is finished, the older woman nods, says nothing and returns to her own work. In Shetland, that apparently counts as high praise.
