The next day of our Shetland Wool Week experience dawned and our first stop was another farm tour. This involved another bus ride. This time we did not have a guide, so the bus driver took it upon himself to give us the tour. This was especially entertaining for me because we passed a lot of the same things and covered the same ground, but from a different perspective. I thought of this as the “buttonologist” tour and it was charming. Nothing too crazy here, did you know loch above Lerwick provides most of the water for Shetland? Or that Shetland produces most of Scotland’s mussels and half of its salmon?

The drive eventually brought us to Uradale Farm. The sheep side of things were run by Ross, who was very nice. The most exciting part was Ross rounding up some of his sheep into the pen for us to admire, but of course it wasn’t Ross who round up the sheep but Pip the sheep dog. It is always amazing to see sheep dogs at work, just utterly locked in. A little trivia for ya is that they told us you always want your sheep dog to have a single-syllable name. This has to do with the commands you’re going to give the dogs apparently. Another piece of trivia is that Pip is very much a sweetie, who enjoyed getting some ear scratches as much as we loved giving them.

Ross’s story is that he found he couldn’t compete with the wool and meat producers when he first started off 30 years ago. You’re up against these giant industrial farms, and if you’re dedicated to Shetland sheep you are at a major disadvantage. Shetland sheep are much smaller than the mainland breeds, which means they produce less meat and less wool. And the wool they produce can be less desirable, what for being multi-colored. So Ross took the other path, raising his sheep organically and catering to much more bespoke places like fancy restaurants for the meat. I think he said he started off with 12 acres but now has 1200, but I wonder if that’s not actually such a great sign; with farming being less desirable the farms naturally wind up consolidating with the people that want to keep farming. I suppose that is the same for agriculture everywhere.

After our outside demonstrations we went on inside for lunch and more chatting abut yarn. One factor here I’ll highlight is that with Jamieson’s being such a force on the island, every other yarn-adjacent thing kinda makes digs at ‘em? The confusingly-named-for-familial-reasons-but-entirely-different-shop Jamieson & Smith has a sign out front of their place that says “Home of Real Shetland Wool.” Here at Uradale it was Ross saying about naming their yarns, “I don’t like names like 1234 something.” Instead they name their yarns after things from Shetland, like the deep layer of peat for the black yarn. Also interesting to note here that they use the same dyes on the different natural colors of the wool off the sheep which provides a whole wide range of different color ways.

This brought us to the stunning discovery that Ross’s wife Viveka aka Dr. Velupillai is a linguistics professor who came to Shetland to study the language. Ross is in fact bilingual, speaking both English and the Shetland dialect. So her whole project was studying and preserving and promoting the language and diving deep into Shetland’s culture. Which made her another Shetland import so yeah man people seem to show up to the island and fall in love and make it their whole life. Married to your work. One of Dr. Velupillai’s efforts is I Hear Dee, which has resources on the language. She gave us the low-down on the various languages that have come to Shetland and how they evolved into the local language and that is super cool. She also designs knitting patterns for her yarns. And then finally they also had a project on display where they recreated an authentic vararfelður, and you could tell it was authentic because of the smell. My super amazing wife walked away from Uradale with yarn for a shawl.

To pad out this blog post and also because I talked about people taking digs at Jamieson’s two paragraphs ago, I will fast forward to the evening when we attended a talk from Jamieson’s. We had been disappointed that we couldn’t nab tickets for the mill tour so this was the next best thing. The talk was mostly about the spinning process, which wasn’t too surprising, though he talked a lot about what a hassle it is to do the dyeing. They’ve brought this upon themselves. One of the big things about Jamieson’s is that they have 220 different colors of yarn. They can’t reduce this number at all because sometimes their commercial customers will want them to recreate stuff and so they need the color. They apparently export the majority of their stuff to Japan. And by “stuff” I mean machine-knit Fair Isle sweaters, so now I know what to keep a lookout for if we ever get to Japan. Though Jamieson’s has started doing blended yarns to get some of their colorways instead of doing it purely with dye, which is simpler in some ways, and avoids some easy ways to make mistakes. A final fun fact is that while we were visiting they had done an exclusive limited-time color, i.e. they had messed up a batch when dyeing. Then the second half of the talk was from Gudrun Johnston, the Brand Director for Simply Shetland. A big part of the talk was how being the Brand Director had changed her perspectives on designing, which seemed to involve designing things with colors they had a lot of and avoiding the colors they didn’t have a lot of.

All in all a very interesting talk and the Jamieson’s folks seemed like good people. But the biggest thing we’ve learned so far is that if you want Shetland yarn, there is actually not shortage of options to choose from.

Reading this week:

• An Outline of Shetland Archaeology by John Stewart

As my super amazing wife describes it there can be a divide between the wool-producing community and the wool-using community. She loves wool in all its forms and her parents also raise sheep, so she bridges the divide, but I am always a little amazed at knitters who don’t quite know how sheep work and farmers who don’t quite know how yarn works. One thing my super amazing wife therefore really appreciated is how much wool week worked to highlight the sheep producers to bring both sides of this industry together. And so our main activity for the day was a history-spanning tour of Old Scatness Broch and Laxdale Farm.

One anecdote before we really begin is that as my super amazing wife and I were milling around in the museum parking lot waiting for the tour bus, a lady spotted me and asked me if I could help put her car in reverse. Clearly rank sexism as I was the only man in the parking lot. But I did in fact know how to put her car in reverse because I drive a DeLorean and so I knew that sometimes you have to move the stick shift in the z direction. I felt like a hero. But before long we were off on the tour bus for the broch! We had a lovely tour guide, yet another import to Shetland herself, who gave us the rundown on everything we passed as we took the long drive down to the very southern tip of the mainland. She talked about how lovely she found Shetland, and how no one ever locked their doors. “How else would Amazon put the packages in your house,” she asked, while also noting she had never even gotten around to asking her landlord for the key to the backdoor of her house. We were also interested to learn that while there are elementary schools spread throughout the isles, for high school the government finds it cheaper to board students in Lerwick during the week and shuttle them back home every weekend than have a more decentralized system.

We arrived at Old Scatness having crossed the airport runway to get there. The site is right next to the runway so we would pause occasionally as a plane landed. The site would normally have been closed when we visited but Wool Week had put together a special tour, stunningly with the lead archeologist of the site herself. She had been working the site for 30 years. She describes being a young archeologist and her boss walking in one day and telling her “I bought you a broch” and she was like “why would you do that, no one studies those anymore.” But they have done some phenomenal archeology on the site, as it was utterly pristine before they figured out that natural hill wasn’t when they were putting in a road there. Significantly, the dating they did there proved that brochs originated in Shetland before moving down to Scotland, instead of the other way around as thought previously. They also found a cool Pictish carving of a bear.

It was indeed a really special tour. They are still working on stabilizing the site enough to let the general public sorta wander around unsupervised, so with our guide we got to scramble over some otherwise un-scrambleable spots. She didn’t have any solid answers on why all these brochs were built in the first place, but said it was best to think of them as castles which served several purposes. She also had a joke I didn’t quite have the archeological background to get that it was the Macedonians who built them because the timelines lined up. The wool connection is that they had found counterweight stones from looms still in situ. Apparently the looms took careful balance so once you were done weaving you could typically just cut the stones off so the order wouldn’t get mixed up and leave them there until the next time you took up weaving. Someone had cut these stones off and not picked the weaving back up, so they were still sitting there a millennia or so later.

From there we fast-forwarded only a couple of centuries to Laxdale Farm to see what this sheep thing was all about. Although we had seen some Shetland sheep the previous day this was our first up-close look at a more money-making farm system. It was a lot of fun. Upon our arrival we split into two groups, and our group first went off to look at the sheep. Our guide for this portion, the husband of the operation, showed us around the barn and told us lots about sheep breeding. I wrote that down in my journal but don’t recall much about how to breed sheep, having been too distracted by the sheep. We also learned about the grazing system, where each farm or croft would have associated rights to graze so many sheep up on the “hel,” or peatlands. And then finally he showed us how to skirt the wool once it was sheared and what he was looking for in a fleece. I found all these Shetlanders funny though hard to tell if they meant to be. One lady asked him how he felt about his wife going into the yarn business, and in response he gave us a look and said “well you support your wife.” Pretty funny, but doubly so when our group went inside and his wife told us the yarn was his idea in the first place. Triply funny when you consider that told us also that he doesn’t even know how the yarn was made, in a callback to my first paragraph there.

The next stop, as was typical in these tours, was inside for refreshments. They gave us coffee and some wonderful brownies, and then the wife Sheila told us all about her yarns. For anyone who wanted to walk away with some yarn (i.e. everyone on the tour), one of their rooms had been converted into a whole yarn shop. All the stuff produced and sold on the islands was indeed gorgeous, though interesting that there wasn’t really a place for small-batch processing on Shetland. You could sell your wool to Jamieson’s, who spins the wool and produces and dyes their own yarn, but if you’re an operation like Laxdale you have to ship the wool down to Scotland to have it spun and then it comes back up to Shetland.

And with that it was back on to Lerwick where we spent the afternoon wandering around. We had dinner reservations and a talk to go to. We checked out The Shetland Times Bookshop and wandered through Fort Charlotte. In the bookshop my super amazing wife bought some cookbooks, which is very on-brand. Eventually I realized I was feeling a bit queasy from only having eaten some brownies since breakfast and I got a sandwich as an appetizer for dinner, which was at The Dowry and great.

Then it was time for our talk, which was An Evening with the Doulls. The Doulls being of course that year’s Wool Week Patrons. When my super amazing wife talked about highlighting wool producers this is actually what she was talking about. The first part of the evening was a short documentary on the Doulls, which again I think was unintentionally very funny. Like there was a talking head moment in the documentary where the interviewee was saying “the Doulls have been raising Shetland sheep to the highest standard for generations” with an immediate smash cut to the Doull patriarch there with a pamphlet saying “here’s the standard” (referring to the standard book, which he helped write as an early member of the Shetland Sheep Society). As an insight into the wool trade, we also learned that all the Doulls need other jobs as well, despite owning something like four islands on which they graze sheep.

After the documentary they had a question-and-answer portion with the Doulls themselves. Seeing the stars of the show man, a Hollywood moment. It was a very charming portion of the evening because of how refreshing it was to see people with absolutely no media training. People were asking things like “how do you know it’s a good fleece” (the documentary talked extensively about how good the Doulls fleeces are, or at least the fleeces of their sheep anyway) and our patriarch there was like “well, uh… you know it when you see it.” Raw, uncut, beautiful. An inspiring part of this is that grandma, the matriarch, had a stroke a few years back and doesn’t have great use of her left arm anymore, but was still able to knit through the use of the traditional Shetland makkin’ belt. These were originally developed to let Shetland women knit while carrying giant baskets of peat, so as to maximize productivity, so very cool really they’re still useful. She was still very capable of making some of that gorgeous lace work (and fast!) we had seen in the museum. Though finally, with the Doulls worn out by their jampacked schedule of media appearances, and my super amazing wife and I worn out from a day full of wool production, it was time to turn in for the night.

Reading this week:

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
• The Africa House by Christina Lamb

Our first taste of Wool Week under our belt, it was time to learn more about Shetland itself and this brought us to the Shetland Museum & Archives.

As mentioned last time, the museum was the home base for Wool Week, so there was a knitting room and if your event had a bus it picked you up there and the Wool Week swag store was there (they had very nice tote bags). It is also a very, very nice museum. Extremely well done and packed with artifacts from throughout Shetland’s history, from the geological underpinnings of the island to the modern-day economy. It’s also a very appropriate home base for Wool Week, because of its vast collection of knitting history.

For example while we were there the special exhibit they had was Chris Morphet, ALLOVER. Chris there, a man of fine taste, noticed all the Fair Isle knitwear in London back in the ‘70s and so started documenting it. The exhibition therefore was of all his pictures of Fair Isle knitwear and the way people wore it. It is fantastic stuff, and useful for a wide range of applications.

One thing I didn’t quite learn until the very tail end of the week, though it is covered some in the museum, the Shetland’s knitwear industry has always been export-driven. Like, okay, it is cold in Shetland and so people find sweaters very useful, but starting at least back in the 15^th century fishermen associated with the Hanseatic League would use Lerwick harbor to salt all the fish they were catching. The Shetlanders would sell them stuff, including knitwear, and so there is a long history of Shetlanders spending all their spare time knitting so as to sell knitwear to visitors. The Fair Isle pattern evolved for the export market, and the designs don’t have any particular known meaning. Fashion baby.

But that’s towards the end of the museum. The beginning of the museum is all pre-history. Shetland has always been at a crossroads, seeing as it is equidistant-ish from a variety of places, and the gulf stream means that while it gets very blustery it never gets like way too cold (it’s way too cold for me most of the time but you know for the kind of people who live on Shetland it’s nice). The upswing of that is that Shetland has been settled for a very long time, and resettled several times, and so you can go to a place like Jarlshof (which we did) and see literally layers of history all stacked on top of each other.

One of the most vibrant layers you see day-to-day is the Norse and Scottish history. Shetland was originally settled probably by Pictish people (or the people that would become Picts), but then eventually the Vikings came and took over. Shetland has signs up all over the place telling you what the name of the place means in old Norse. The Vikings were apparently very uncreative; “Lerwick” means “muddy bay.” Most of the names are like that. But then Christian I, King of Norway, pledged Shetland against the dowry he was going to pay when he married his daughter Margaret off to James III of Scotland. Christian never paid the dowry so Shetland was the dowry and the islands were Scottish once more. This was 1470 and it is still a thing they talk about all the time. During the week we had a lovely dinner at The Dowry, for example. This is of course strange to our American sensibilities; I am from Maryland we fought a war with Pennsylvania that one time but you never hear us talk about it.

Anyways, I keep straying from the museum. Like I said it is great. They have bog butter (!), and again old food is one of my favorites types of museum artifacts and this was my first bog butter to boot. And they have all sorts of stone age and bronze age and iron age implements, and examples of houses, and boats! So many boats. They like boats in Shetland, being an island, and also descended from Vikings. The traditional Shetland boats are descended from Viking boats too.

And then that brings us upstairs where they talk about all the industry of Shetland, which is a lot of fishing, and then more textiles! Besides regular ole’ knitting, the other most impressive textile export of Shetland is lace! Not true lace, as Wikipedia has just told me, but extremely fine knitted lacewear that is just so remarkably impressive. I saw some weaving of it and I just don’t know how they do it. That has got to take a lifetime of skill to master and the pieces they had on display are just so, so impressive. The height of fashion before I think even Fair Isle knitting was so man there you go.

And like, from there the day wasn’t even done! We hadn’t even checked into the inn yet! After the museum and some lunch we went over to the Wool Week craft fair where people had all sorts of stuff on display, and then drove back north again to go to Vidlin where there was another craft fair, and then the final exhibit we saw for the day was another tapestry! As part of Wool Week the absolutely gorgeous Murmuration Collaboration was on display. This was a series of tapestries, all made by different weavers around the world, coming together to display one long image of murmuration over a landscape. Like so many tapestries we had seen on this trip it was unbelievably stunning in person, with such intricate technique to depict the birds (and their murmuration) themselves. And this was I think the first time it came all together. Very much worth the drive.

And lo, with that, the day finally came to its end. We picked up some salads at Tesco for dinner and finally checked on into our inn.

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.