| While the crofting year has a task for every season,
the arts and crafts on Fair Isle is an all year round feature of the isle.
Crafts of all types are represented here
on Fair Isle with spinners and knitters, a builder of
traditional wooden boats and makers of traditional
straw-backed chairs and spinning wheels.
There are also writers, musicians, poets,
painters and photographers as well as those
using modern technology as a means of expression. |
Paintings by J. C. Best
 |
The
real ‘Fair Isle’ knitwear
The term ‘Fair Isle Knitting' is now used worldwide for a type of stranded colour
knitting with horizontal bands of geometric patterns. But this unique style developed on
Fair Isle long ago, when local knitters discovered that fine yarns stranded into a double
layer produce durable, warm, yet lightweight garments.
For hundreds of years demand for hand-knitting kept Fair Isle women busy. Islanders
traded with passing ships, bartering their home-made textiles and fresh produce for goods
they couldn’t make themselves.
Today the only source of the genuine article is still Fair Isle, where a small
co-operative - Fair Isle Crafts
- produces traditional and contemporary sweaters on
hand-frame machines, quality-controlled and labelled with Fair Isle's own trade mark.
The traditional colours of red, blue, brown, yellow and
white, combined with the original patterns, were much sought after for their
unique value, but in the 1920s Fair Isle sweaters knitted in the natural
wool colours of brown, grey, fawn and white became highly fashionable.
A small number of high quality
hand-knitted and hand-crafted Fair Isle garments is also produced on the
island.
For further details please contact
Elizabeth Riddiford and
Kathy Coull.
|
Straw-backed chair by Stewart
Thomson
Fair Isle knitwear |
