on Sam the Ram, Whitefaced Dartmoor sheep from Paula Wolton’s flock In contrast to the historic films presented last week which reveal the story of how wool suffered with the advent of artificial textiles in the 1950s, this evening WOVEMBER shares the trailer for a very different sort of film: one that celebrates the lives past,… Continue Reading OneHutFull: Friday night Vi-EWE-ing!
on Yesterday Kate Graham talked about the successful sheep sponsorship scheme she ran this year. Having read the sponsorship thread on the Shankend Farming group on Ravelry and seen the sponsors excitedly chatting about their sheep and fleeces Louise asked for some of the fleece fosterers to talk to WOVEMBER about their experiences of the scheme.… Continue Reading Sponsors of Shankend Sheep
on In the second of this week’s WOVEMBER posts featuring Kate Graham and her farm at Shankend, Louise finds out more about the sponsorship scheme Kate runs. Earlier this year I had read an article about Ralph Lauren buying yarn from a farm in Oregon to clad the entire USA team for the Winter Olympics in… Continue Reading Shankend Sheep Sponsorship
on Stella Sutherland is a writer from Bressay, Shetland. She has written four collections of poetry, contributed to a number of anthologies and written articles. I have always enjoyed Stella’s poetry which connects to animals and the landscape – a landscape very recognisable to me, as a Bressa’ lass myself. I was reading through one of… Continue Reading Wovember Words: Shetland Ewe
on Kate Graham has been the tenant farmer at Shankend, in the Scottish Borders, since September 2010. Not only has she successfully run her sheep sponsorship scheme this year (more of which we will be learning about later this week) but work at Shankend certainly keep her busy. With the average age of UK farmers reaching… Continue Reading Adventures in farming: Kate from Shankend
on At Wovember we take great pleasure in enabling you to wear 100% wool. Always keen to promote the myriad of breed yarns available in the UK, Louise has selected some of the UK’s more characterful wool yarns to bring out the most in a design. I get a lot of email enquiries from people who… Continue Reading Which wool?
on When I was small I was fascinated by a packaged cake of soap in a friend’s loo. I went home to say that next door that had soap made from “fat wool”. Wool fat soap is actually lanolin, the natural wax (not fat) in sheep’s wool, which waterproofs our woolly friends and provides anti-fungal protection.… Continue Reading Wovember Words: Wool fat 'recipe'
on Chrissie Day is a textile artist who runs Teesdale Fibres. She has made it her mission to source local wool and her pedigree Teeswater and BFL yarns have been dyed by Yarn Garden , proving hugely popular at the wool shows this year. As well as finding time to run her wool production she is… Continue Reading British from Fleece to Finish
on At the Highland Wool Festival, in May, I was really lucky to have met Louise and George, who are Yarn Garden. Yarn Garden have been dyeing yarn for over a year now and you might have seen them at yarn events or wool shows with their lovely greenhouse-come-potting shed full of seedling trays of delightful yarn.… Continue Reading Wovember words: Dyed in the wool passion
on This song appears in a collection of Island and Highland tunes compiled by composer Hugh Robertson, in the 1950s. I had heard it referred to before as the Shetland Spinning Song, but that is quite incorrect as it features the kind of beautiful non-lexical vocables (think to Hickory-dickory-dock) which are present in Gaelic purit a… Continue Reading Wovember Words: Island Spinning Song