Denise > Here’s a scarf that I finished making today.  The handspun warp is made with wool from Masham sheep – which are native to a certain district in northern England.  The weft, too, is handspun, with wool from Merino sheep (dyed purple and lavendar), white Shetland sheep, and just a few grams of Angelina – a synthetic fibre that sparkles with the colours of the fibres it is spun together with.  Used sparingly, it adds a touch of magic to a winter wardrobe.  I wove the scarf on our Glimåkra floor loom, then washed and tented it, before finishing it with my ‘handwoven’ label.

This is Crotal, a lichen which is commonly found – throughout the Outer Hebrides – on rocks, gravestones and even on roofs. One traditional recipe involves fermenting an orange-brown lichen in urine, to produce a purple dye!

This Ladies’ Wrap or Shawl will certainly make a statement, with a generous size of approx. 40cm wide, 260cm long (plus twizzled fringes), hand-woven with hand-spun yarns, and made with luxury fibres – wool from Shetland, Masham and Merino sheep, and natural tussah silk.

Mugwort is a plant with numerous traditional uses, including as a treatment for malaria, depression, joint pain, and a great deal more.  But it’s the use as a dye stuff that got us interested, and having read up on the subject, back at home, we immediately set out once again to the track through the dunes at Smercleit where we had found numerous large specimens of the plant.

This year, for the first time, we have produced for our mill-spun range, a marled yarn – with one strand Hebridean, the black contrasting sharply with the strands of Cheviot – inspired by seeing the two breeds  gathered together into one fank.