Armchair Travels: Shetland - Knitting Traditions

At last we come to the moment every knitter has been waiting for, when all that island wool meets a pair of needles. Central to the celebration of Shetland Wool Week are two enduring traditions, Fair Isle and Shetland lace, each shaped by the same fleece, landscape, and generations of skilled hands. One is a blaze of color banded across a sweater; the other so airy and fine it seems less knitted than breathed into being. Together, they carried the name of these islands into the wider world and continue to inspire knitters who gather each year to celebrate Shetland wool.

Fair Isle: Heritage in Living Color

Fair Isle knitting takes its name from a tiny, remote island at the southern edge of Shetland called Fair Isle, and its signature is unmistakable: rows of small, repeating motifs marching in bands of shifting color, from peerie patterns ("peerie" means little in Shetland dialect!) to the big, bold shapes knitters call OXOs. The traditional method followed three elegant rules: use no more than 5 colors across a whole garment, use only two colors in a single row, and minimize long floats. The garment is traditionally knitted in the round as a seamless tube, then bravely cut open, a heart-stopping technique called steeking, to make room for armholes and neck.

Like any craft this old, Fair Isle carries its origin story close to its heart. Islanders have long told of the Spanish Armada ship El Gran Grifón, wrecked off the isle in 1588, and of the stranded sailors who, sheltered by the island families, may have shared the colorful knitting of their homeland in return. Knitters born generations ago could still remember hearing that tale from their own grandmothers, handed down as faithfully as the patterns themselves. No one can say for certain how much of it happened, and the craft surely drew as well on the stranded-color traditions of Scandinavia and the Baltic. Yet the story has been treasured on the islands for so long that it has become part of the knitting itself.

What we can say for certain is the moment Fair Isle became a sensation. In 1925 the fashionable Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was painted by John St Helier Lander dressed for the golf course in a Fair Isle jumper with a favorite terrier under his arm, an image that did much to fix the look in the public eye. In fact, the style swept from remote croft to London drawing room almost overnight. A little earlier that same decade, the Shetland painter Stanley Cursiter set it down in his 1923 portrait "The Fair Isle Jumper," the very painting, you may recall, that shaped this year's Wool Week hat. Before long, Paris houses were spinning their own takes on it, and Fair Isle has moved in and out of fashion, and never quite out of favor, from that day to this.

The heart of it, for the knitter, is the color. Drawing on the natural shades of the sheep we met last time, warmed here and there with a few dyed tones, you can "paint" entire landscapes in wool. Our Fair Isle sets gather a run of harmonizing shades ready to cast on. 

For those who like to compose their own palette, the classic Shetland yarns of Jamieson's of Shetland and Jamieson & Smith offer a range of colors as broad as a Shetland sky, every shade spun on the islands from genuine Shetland wool.

Shetland Lace: Gossamer Cobwebs in Wool

Here lies the great paradox of Shetland: that knitting this fine should come from land this fierce. The very gales that scour the cliffs and the salt that stings the moors are what give the native sheep their extraordinarily fine fleece, and island hands turned that fleece into shawls so weightless they might have been knitted from mist. It seems to defy the place it was born, until you notice how much delicacy the islands themselves hold: wildflowers tucked in amongst sheer cliffs, sea foam lacing the shore, lichen tracing patterns across the stone. Shetland was always both, immense and intricate, and lace simply gathers that intricacy into thread.

Shetland lace can be knitted so impossibly fine that an entire shawl, close to two meters square, will slide through a wedding ring with room to spare, which is how the celebrated "wedding ring shawls" came by their name. Its home was Unst, the northernmost island of all, where the most exquisite work was done, and where a needlework dictionary of 1882 declared that no knitting anywhere surpassed it. The labor behind such a shawl is immense. A single fine one might swallow hundreds of hours and something close to half a million stitches, drawn from nearly six miles of thread so slender that only a handful of spinners in the world could ever make it. Little wonder that in their heyday these gossamer shawls were reckoned, ounce for ounce, more precious than gold.

Such treasures had their golden age in Victorian times, when Queen Victoria's own love of Shetland lace set the whole country clamoring for shawls and stoles, and the island knitters could barely keep pace with the demand from the south. After the Queen died in 1901 the craze cooled, and it was around then that Fair Isle began its own ascent, the two great traditions passing the baton across the turn of the century.

Such fineness begins with the wool itself. The very softest fibers, plucked by hand from the neck and throat of the sheep, were spun on a traditional wheel into a single ply finer than sewing thread, so fine it seems to float like a halo in the light. Few of us today are about to spin our own from hand-rooed fleece, of course, and happily we do not have to. Jamieson & Smith's 2ply Shetland Supreme Lace Weight, developed by the island wool brokers to revive this very craft, puts a genuine Shetland lace yarn in our hands, and it is the yarn many Shetland lace knitters reach for now to carry the tradition onward. The old skill lives on, needle by needle.

Not every Shetland shawl was so rarefied, of course. Alongside the showpieces, island women knitted the humble hap, a warm everyday wrap with a plain center and a soft lace edge, made to be lived in and worn daily. And the fine tradition has not been left to fade. At the Unst Heritage Centre, knitters have carefully reverse-engineered century-old shawls, once found forgotten in an island shop, working out their patterns one row at a time so the old designs are not lost to us.

Carrying It Forward

Bold as a Fair Isle yoke or light as a lace veil, these two traditions are the heart of why Shetland wool is spoken of with such reverence, and the very existence of Shetland Wool Week. The yarns behind them, the colorwork shades and the fine lace weight alike, are waiting on our shelves for an island adventure of your own. Next time, in our final stop, we meet the makers who turn raw island fleece into that very yarn: the storied houses of Jamieson & Smith, Jamieson's of Shetland, and Uradale, and the designers keeping Shetland's captivating techniques alive. We have saved the best of the journey for last.