Armchair Travels: Shetland - Inside Shetland Wool Week

As September draws to a close, Shetland stands at the center of an international gathering devoted to wool and the traditions built around it. A pilgrimage of knitters, spinners, weavers, and dyers travel from every continent to a place where wool runs in the very blood of the land, and for seven days each autumn Shetland becomes the beating heart of the fiber world. This is Shetland Wool Week, and in 2026 it runs from September 27 through October 3. Having explored the islands themselves last time, we arrive now in time for their greatest celebration.

What is Shetland Wool Week?

Now in its seventeenth year, Shetland Wool Week has earned an international reputation as one of the foremost celebrations of wool and textile heritage. Its subject is Shetland itself: the native sheep, the quality of their fleece, the crofters who tend them, and the generations of skilled makers behind the islands' celebrated Fair Isle and lace traditions.

Visitors to Wool Week experience open studios, farms, museums, and village halls up and down the archipelago, as far south as the tip of the Mainland and as far north as Unst, the island famed for its gossamer lace. There are classes in spinning, dyeing, weaving, Fair Isle colorwork, and the finest lacework, taught by island makers whose skills reach back through the generations. There are farm visits to meet the sheep, fleece competitions, exhibitions, open studios, and a lively Makers' Market brimming with island yarn. At the center of it all sits the Hub, a warm gathering place where knitters sink into borrowed armchairs, needles clicking, to swap patterns and make friends from the far side of the world.

Shop the 2026 Wool Week Annual (opens in new tab)

For those who love to carry a treasure home, there is the Wool Week Annual, a much-anticipated yearly collection of patterns and essays that has become a collector's item in its own right. Inside the 2026 edition, you'll find seven stunning designs showcasing the versatility of Shetland wool.

Last year brought a particularly special Wool Week for The Woolly Thistle, as Corinne and Maggie traveled to Shetland to take part in the celebration themselves. They learned about color in Fair Isle knitting, tried tablet weaving on Yell, explored exhibitions of local knitwear and lace, attended evening talks, and visited makers around the islands. They also found time for the less formal, but equally classic, pleasures of Wool Week: fish and chips in Lerwick, tea and cake at community gatherings, sheep along the roadside, and conversations with knitters wherever they went. They came home with an even greater appreciation for how closely Shetland's textile traditions remain tied to the landscape, community, and everyday life of the islands. Their account of the week was full of laughter, admiration, and one repeated observation: everyone they met was extraordinarily welcoming. You can watch them reminisce on Episode #265 of our ShopCast!

How It All Began

For an event with such global reach, Shetland Wool Week had modest beginnings. It was born in 2010 as the islands' answer to the Campaign for Wool, a drive launched by the then Prince of Wales to champion the fiber at a moment when fleece prices had bottomed out and wool had slipped out of fashion. Jamieson & Smith, the Lerwick wool brokers who have bought up the Shetland clip for generations, joined forces with the Shetland Amenity Trust and the Shetland Museum to put on a handful of classes. Much of the credit belongs to the late Jimmy Moncrieff of the Amenity Trust, a tireless champion of island heritage who was determined to turn that first small gathering into something lasting. He succeeded beyond anyone's imagining.

What started with a few workshops now draws close to a thousand makers to the islands each year, with hundreds of events packed across the week. As one organizer once joked, it has become the biggest event in Shetland that sets nothing ablaze, which, considering our visit to Up Helly Aa last time, is really saying something.

The Baa-ginning of a Tradition

Shop the Baa-ble Hat Set (opens in new tab)

If Wool Week has one emblem above all others, it is the annual official Shetland Wool Week Hat. It was the 2015 design that turned the idea into a phenomenon. That year's patron, the Shetland designer Donna Smith, created the Baa-ble Hat, a cheerful pattern with a ring of tiny sheep grazing around the brim, and shared it free with anyone who wanted to knit it. What happened next caught everyone off guard. It raced across social media, reaching tens of thousands of knitters within days, and before long Baa-ble Hats were turning up on heads far beyond the islands. That runaway success is what truly launched the annual hat as a beloved ritual. Every spring since, a new patron has been named and handed the same happy task: to design the hat that will crown the coming Wool Week. Katie's Kep, the Crofthoose Hat, the Bousta Beanie, the Merrie Dancers Toorie, each one now marks a year in the festival's story.

Browse Shetland Wool Week Hat Sets (opens in new tab)

Meet the Birsie Beanny

Which brings us to this year's crowning glory. The 2026 patron is Helen Robertson, a Shetland textile artist, silversmith, and knitting tutor whose work is held in collections around the world, and her hat is a slouchy, characterful design called the Birsie Beanny. Its shape was inspired by a 1923 portrait by the Shetland painter Stanley Cursiter, "The Fair Isle Jumper," and its design draws motifs from across Helen's own life. Though the hat is worked in stranded colorwork rather than lace, several of those motifs pay tribute to Shetland's lace tradition: one band echoes a pattern called Liss Hols, the very lace holes her granny once knitted into a christening shawl on Unst, and a crown recalls her lace tree-of-life work. A heart borrowed from her Mariner's Compass hat sits among them, and the festival's name runs proudly around the brim. The playful finishing touch is a set of optional fringed tassels known as toosks, which give the hat its name, since birsie means "hairy" in the Shetland dialect. They tip a hat, so to speak, to the island's old taatit rugs and even to the tasseled purse of the seventeenth-century Gunnister Man, recovered from a Shetland peat bog centuries after he was laid there.

Shop the Birsie Beanny Set (opens in new tab)

Inspired by the Birsie Beanny and its lively use of color, Cait and Maggie created additional palettes of their own. You’ll find their colorways available as yarn sets in the shop, ready for another take on Helen Robertson’s design.

Discover More Birsie Beanny Colorways (opens in new tab)

Knit Along from Anywhere

Even sans tickets and passport, distance does not put Wool Week out of reach. Thousands of knitters take part from their own homes every year, casting on the patron's hat and sharing their progress with makers across the globe. The Woolly Thistle is proud to be the exclusive source of the printed Birsie Beanny pattern here in the States, and we have yarn packs made up in each of Helen's four colorways, ready for you to pick your palette and cast on. The coveted Annual and this year's Wool Week merchandise are close at hand too.

Shop the Birsie Beanny Pattern Booklet (opens in new tab)

Next time we turn our attention to the true stars of Shetland: the small, sturdy sheep whose fleece makes all of this possible, and whose story is where Shetland wool truly begins.