Wool Holiday Workshops

Sorry for the lack of blog posts of late - it has been a busy few weeks with holiday things, other work and some deadlines.  Shetland Wool Week ran two holidays during the summer, one inJuly and one in August.  The holidays consist of 5 packed days of sightseeing, workshops on Fair Isle knitting, lace knitting, spinning and visits to woolly places and I had the pleasure of giving the lovely ladies a couple of workshops.

Hazel Tindall ran the first workshop of the holidays, she did an introduction to Fair Isle knitting.  The class made "Mug Haps" or mug cosies (so called as in Shetland a hap is a large shawl you can wrap up warm in), and I did the second part of this where we looked at steeking, and finishing methods.

The class I took was held in the long room at Busta House in Brae, a lovely setting for a relaxing afternoon knitting.

 

These are the lovely ladies in the July class, we had a surprise visit from Susan Crawford (of the Vintage Shetland Project), Ella Gordon of Ella Gordon Designs and Louise Scollay (AKA KnitBritish)  Hazel Tindall also popped in to see how the group were doing.

 

 These are the lovely ladies from the August group

In the evening after both classes I ran a workshop of basic wet felting techniques, it was a short workshop since one half of the group did some spinning and the other half did felting and then they swapped over half way through.  There is so much that can be done with felting and this was very much a taster session, I think many of the ladies were keen to try it again they found it quite therapeutic!

 

The next wool holiday is planned for Thursday 19th November - Wednesday 25th November and again in March (dates to be confirmed) - this would be a perfect way to break up the autumn months before Christmas.  For details see the holiday page on the Shetland Wool Week website by clicking here. 

I quite fancy going on it myself!