Reading this week:

• Ancient Africa by Christopher Ehret

Now to the nitty-gritty of Wool Week. Shetland Wool Week as I understand it is a relatively young addition (only 16 years old) to the worldwide wool circuit. It is definitely popular and is probably at this point pushing the capacity of Shetland. We only lucked into a hotel room; the place we booked had just reopened so we managed to nab a room by sheer chance (it was an absolutely lovely place by the way, The Westings inn run by David, who gave us all sorts of tips and made sure we had breakfast every morning and got us croissants in between his half a dozen other jobs on the island). Other places I emailed told me they were booked two years out for Wool Week. And this isn’t even tourist season; Wool Week by design is scheduled in the off-peak times. It overlapped the end of September and beginning of October, and some places, like the Sumburgh Head Lighthouse’s visitor center or the ferry to Mousa Broch, in fact close down starting October 1. We also lucked into good weather, as the whole week was gorgeous but apparently the previous one was terrible (we had heard this everywhere in the UK).

The Wool Week folks also go to great lengths to build a community. There are online events and a Facebook group and it behooves you to be in them. Although we rented a car for the week, many people are relying on public transportation or carpools to get around (many ticketed events have dedicated busses from Lerwick), and those are arranged in those groups beforehand. During Wool Week itself, they set up a crafting and rest space in the Shetland Museum & Archives, which serves as the home base for Wool Week. There you can also arrange those same car pools as well as swap tickets for the various Wool Week events. Since everything is so popular you have to get tickets for events and classes online beforehand, which all go on sale at the same time. This was the only frustrating part of the experience really, as the organization tries to update its tools to meet demand. We did not get the exact tickets we wanted due to a website glitch, which upset me deeply at the time, but the Wool Week people were very kind indeed.

So that’s the setup. Meanwhile we had just gotten into our rental car, weren’t set to check into the hotel until the afternoon (it was early enough in the morning that even the metropolis of Lerwick hadn’t really woken up yet), and my super amazing wife had not had breakfast. That meant we embarked on the most perilous of all possible activities right away: getting breakfast at the local café. Don’t worry, we managed to survive, getting a table, eating breakfast, and I think managing not to annoy the staff or locals too much. It was also very cheap to boot. The most entertaining part was overhearing another restaurant owner comment about how this year he was going to be prepared for all the vegetarians among the Wool Week crowds.

But now it was time to meet some of those Wool Weekers ourselves. They were easy to spot throughout the week; every year Wool Week comes out with a special hat pattern beforehand so my super amazing wife and knitted some up for us, and everyone else is wearing the same pattern in different colors. Our first day we didn’t have any ticketed events planned, but there were plenty of open workshops to go to. The very first one we went to was The Wooly Wyvern. They make really nice socks on a hand-cranked circular knitting machine. They have both socks made from Shetland wool meant mostly for indoor use (the Shetland wool is fine and soft but less durable than other breeds, apparently) along with sturdier versions. But the real fun is getting there, bounding over the Shetland roads to a town on the very tip of one of Shetland’s little peninsulas. We parked at the Walls Regatta Club and then had to open the gate to the Wyvern owner’s backyard to get to their workshop. This was a theme throughout Wool Week, because so much of the wool and knitting industry in Shetland happens in people’s homes and backyards. In this backyard we learned some about sock knitting and then picked up socks as gifts for our relatives in cooler climes.

And then it was off to the next backyard! This was The Silly Sheep Fibre Company, which truly was an inspiration. Throughout our time in Shetland we were meeting a whole lot of people not from there who had moved there (though they were mostly married to Shetlanders to be fair). The Silly Sheepers here had set up what amounted to a retirement homestead with a bunch of sheep. Many of these they were given. The wife of the couple apparently has a big soft heart and so nearby farmers will give her baby lambs from their flocks when their mothers reject them (parenthood isn’t for everyone). You have to bottle-feed these lambs, and it isn’t worth it for most farmers. This was our first glimpse of Shetland sheep as well, and boy those guys are a treat. They are so small! This makes them hardy and able to survive the Shetland winters all on their own, and also makes them easy to handle because you can just like pick ‘em up (I mean they’re not like cat-sized but as far as sheep go they are small). This also means they produce less wool and meat but they are still very very cute, even for sheep. The husband explained this all to us while we admired his flock, and then we went into their little shop to check out the selection of home-grown wool products, which set us up already for the archetypal Wool Week experience. But don’t worry, there is a lot more to come.