Meet Siún Carden, researcher with the University of the Highlands and Islands, Shetland.
Issue 3 of the print magazine is now out!
Originally from Co. Down, Siún arrived in Shetland in 2016 as a research fellow with the idyllically named Centre for Island Creativity.
After a stint at Queens and a lecture series on knitting, a job devoted to knitting research seemed too good to be true. A midnight journey on the overnight ferry from Aberdeen and a successful interview later, Siún packed her bags and moved to the North Atlantic archipelego.
‘I assumed it would only be for a short time because I always really wanted to move to a bigger city. I was surprised that I absolutely loved Shetland.’
Long a place of travel and trade, blow-ins are not as unusual as one might expect.
‘There's a lot of migration in both directions. There are a lot of people here who started their lives elsewhere. People who were born here often have family all around the world and are very well travelled through the oil & fishing industries and the Merchant Navy & Navy. Because of boats, Shetland has always been a place of people coming in and out.’
Are islanders welcoming?
‘As long as you can make yourself useful.’
Duly noted.
My name is Dr Aoife Long and I write weekly articles about the slow fashion scene in Ireland. Sometimes it’s an interview with an Irish designer, sometimes it’s an essay on history of textiles and the people who made them.
In Ireland, there is a story under every stone and an artist under every rock. I fully expect the internet to disappear before I run out of stories.
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The same latitude as Bergen in Norway and Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon territory, the Shetland islands are the only part of Britain to be considered subarctic.
A chilly 260 miles North of Scotland, the Shetland islands have a distinct history, heritage and even language. Perhaps the least Gaelic part of all of Scotland, inhabitants spoke Norn, a now extinct language in the same family as Icelandic and Faroese.
Siún now lives in a tiny village on an island off an island off mainland Shetland; the islands are connected by bridges so it doesn't feel so isolated. Though villages may blur together to the explorer keen to see ‘everything’, each little bay has a story to share. For instance, Siún’s village was the origin of an absolutely wild carved stone which commemorated the arrival of Irish monks to West Burra; the depiction of two bird headed men holding a skull between their beaks was supposedly carved later.
Though the fishing and tourism industries employ a good proportion of Shetland’s 23,000 residents, Shetland is still home to a large knitwear industry, though it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find machine programmers & linkers.
(Linking is the joining of knitwear pieces at the seams; essentially knitting rather than sewing the pieces together to keep the elasticity. It’s precise manual work that is badly paid and quite boring.)
The retention of skills is a conversation that greatly interests Siún; what constitutes a skill? How are skills transmitted (or not)? Do we count machine knitting as a skill to be preserved?
Siun’s first research project on Shetland involved the Shetland Peerie Makkers, the local group devoted to teaching schoolchildren the ancient skills of knitting.
‘Luckily for me, when I arrived, there was the nucleus of a project already up and running; the Peerie Makkers had approached our research centre to do a project in partnership, to demonstrate the value of Shetland hand knitting specifically.
Comprised of women around retirement age, the local knitting group is a key element in passing on the skills of hand knitting.
Until 2010, knitting was a standard subject in Shetland schools.
Why is that?
Well, Shetland had an oil boom in the late 70s and 80s, which completely transformed life on the islands. Locals knew which way the wind was blowing when it came to handicrafts and in an amazingly farsighted move, money was set aside to promote and preserve the tradition of knitting.
Eventually the money ran out and the Peerie Makkers ran in to fill the gap of knowledge in the so-called missing generation who did not learn to knit at home. Run entirely by volunteers, the project is funded by the creative community around the world; for example, a weaving store in Michigan raised hundreds of dollars for the project last summer.
Having previously conducted research into Aran knitting in Galway and Southwest Donegal, Siun became interested in the parallels and differences between Aran knitting and Fairisle knitting.
‘Why do we have two North Atlantic islands with really recognisable, commercially successful styles of knitting which have now escaped into the world to be adapted by all sorts of people and places?’
It’s an interesting question; harsh climates & hardy animals make hardwearing woollen clothing is an obvious choice; we often forget that for thousands of years, wool was one of few options for clothing. By the 1500s, the wool industry in Britain was a huge source of employment; 90,000 knitters were employed to make stockings alone by the late sixteenth century. Presumably the Industrial & Agricultural revolutions pushed labour intensive cottage industry to increasingly peripheral areas, where they survived in some variation.
So how many hand-knitters are left on Shetland?
‘It's vanishingly small, but also difficult to know who you would include in that, because it's not people who are making all of their living from it.
Yes, there are people who might sell some things that they make, but it's certainly not a living wage.
And in fact, it may never have been.
Portfolio careers are nothing new, especially to crofters and the history of commercial knitting in Shetland. You know, it has this quite specific and complicated history around the truck system.
It went on for a long time, and it may have operated differently for different people. It wasn't black and white, but it's remembered as being really exploitative of hand knitters because they were basically at the mercy of merchants; knitters would not be paid in cash, they'd be paid in goods from the shop.
So you could end up in a very perilous position in relation to the merchants.
People in Shetland remembered knitters being paid in tea and sugar, if you were lucky; sometimes knitters were paid in luxury goods, but not anything you could eat. So you might have a house with, you know, beautiful wallpaper and curtains but be starving.
(There’s an anecdote which lends a lot more depth to the current slow fashion conversation. I’m starting to think fashion has always been based on exploitation in one form or another.)
Any ideas how we might save these skills?
‘I'm not making this case myself, but you could argue that skills have never been safer because they're all on YouTube now. What was an oral tradition is now preserved on video. But when people talk about dying skills, they are generally not referring to the loss of technical knowledge.’
Personally, I have a suspicion that video tutorials fall short; crafters are a notoriously humble subsection of the population and may not view their skills as worth recording & a small section of that subsection may keep certain techniques private out of commercial concerns.
Speaking of commercial activities…
Researching hand knitting will inevitably lead to an interest in machine knitting. Siún sees the two crafts as being integrally linked through a culture of making, creativity & technical know-how.
‘If you focus only on Shetland hand-knitting, you're missing a lot because there's such a massive interconnection and overlap historically [between hand and machine knitting], particularly at the height of the Shetland knitting industry in the mid 20th century.
A lot of people on the island were involved in knitting, linking and hand finishing in homes and factories as part of the mass production industry.’
With an estimated 100,000 sheep on the islands, the Shetland wool clip is still kept separate from the UK clip.
It is impossible to explore the story of Shetland wool without mentioning (and definitely not mixing up) the following two companies, Jamiesons of Shetland and Jamieson and Smith.
Both companies have acted as wool brokers, both have mills, both produce an immense amount of yarns in a huge variety of colours, which can be used interchangeably.
Both produce finished garments; in addition to manufacturing for other brands, Jamiesons of Shetland also export their own designs to boutiques across the UK and to places as far-flung as Japan.
Is there a factory on Shetland that caters to those with a burning desire to produce knitwear in small batches?
‘Yes! There is the little mini factory in Shetland college called the Textile Facilitation Unit. It has always had a dual purpose, it’s partly to educate students and partly to make short runs of knitwear for small local businesses and sometimes small businesses that are not local at all.’
Shetland is also home to a thriving community of crafters and local designer-artists such as Nielanell, Ninian and R.A.M. knitwear. At the time of my conversation with Siún, Shetland Wool Week had just returned to the islands after a two year absence; I was advised to wait for everyone to recover before approaching for interviews!
I am grateful for Siún’s generosity and time; you can find Siún on Twitter or (if you’re very lucky indeed) you might get a chance to chat to her at a yarn festival or other rare occasions where there are confirmed sightings of knitting researchers.
Please find below a selection of Siún’s published research:
Carden, S. 2022. ‘Authenticity and Place-Based Knitwear: Fair Isle and Aran Knitting in Shetland and the West of Ireland‘. Textile: Cloth and Culture
Carden, S. 2019. ‘The Place of Shetland Knitting‘. Textile: Cloth and Culture 17(3): 357-367
Carden, S. 2014. ‘Cable Crossings: The Aran Jumper as Myth and Merchandise’. Costume 48(2): 260-275
Dr Aoife Long is a fashion writer and a creative director at Spirit and Luxury.
PS. Thank you so much for all your support. On the heels of sold out first and second issues of the print magazine (!!!), I’d like to tell you about the October edition.
From the wilds of Shetland to the sheltered valleys of the Lakes, from the beaches of West Cork to the Georgian houses of Dublin, knitting, even today, emerges as a common thread.
This article, along with many other juicy interviews, can be found in the third volume of ‘Slow Fashion’ the magazine, which explores modern & historical knitting through interviews with leading knitwear designers, educators and researchers. Also included is an article about Mise Tusa, a gem of a slow fashion brand from Co. Galway.
I would like to thank those profiled for their time, trust and truth; special thanks to Ailbíona McLochlainn for contributing a knitting pattern, specifically written for the Spirit & Luxury Irish Wool yarn.
You will perhaps note throughout this issue the importance of fair wages for crafters, crofters and artists of all ilk. Though by no means a new conversation, 'tis a timely one, to which we will be returning over the coming months.
Thank you for reading.
Aoife
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