Jamieson's of Shetland & Di Gilpin on Ganseys - Ep. 70 - Fruity Knitting

[Music] [Music] welcome to fruity knitting this is episode 70 I'm Andrew and I'm Andrea and we're back in our often buy lounge room after our travels in Wales yeah and the last couple of days it's really been snowing here it's a beautiful landscape and it's definitely the Bleak Midwinter so I wanted to tell you one of my favorite poems in the Bleak Midwinter frosty wind made moan Earth Stood hard as iron water like a stone snow has fallen snow on snow snow on snow in the Bleak Midwinter long ago that is a great little simple poem by Christina Rossetti and yesterday when I was walking in the woods the landscape was just white and frigid and icy and that poem just really brings up the melancholy feeling that I feel when I'm in that beautiful landscape yeah yeah it's such a stark difference between summer and winter yeah yeah it's great anyway moving on we have two fantastic interviews for you in this episode when we were in Shetland we visited the Jameson's of Shetland woollen mill again but this time we got to interview Elaine and her son Gary Jamison so Jamie sense of Shetland is a fifth-generation family-run business so it's great to hear their story especially told in their lovely Shetland accents and the spindrift is probably their best-known yarn it's sold in yarn stores all around the world and it's a fantastic yarn for knitting fairer or stranded knitting with and it's also very inexpensive so many of you will actually be very familiar with this yarn company but we're really excited that you'll get to know the family in a more personal way through this interview because it really is a great interview yeah a lot of fun and we've got another interview with the UK designer dye Gilpin who we did a major feature on back in episode 55 so if you haven't seen that episode yet go back and watch it we really cover a lot of dye Gilpin's work throughout her career and so it's a really good one to watch today she's joining us to talk about the Scottish Gansey jumper which is another one of her passion so that's a lot of fun and she also shows us one of her latest or she's working on a special design and she showed and talks about it and this special design is especially for Andrews yeah yeah you heard that correctly and of course I am extremely flattered well hear hear more about that later in the show we also have new releases featuring Natasha Hornby from moonstruck knits we've got updates on our own projects bit of work happened there and Andrea you're starting a new craft yes I'm starting a new craft so don't fear knitting is still my first and main passion I was going to say only fashion but it's not my only pleasure yeah this check - isn't that rejecting and meddling so anyway I am very excited because I finally committed myself to learn how to crochet properly I first got the itch to crochet properly when I saw how the UK designer Marie Wallen combines crochet and knit fabric together in a lot of her garment designs and for example if you have a look at this picture here this is a design of hers called lovage and you can see that she is sewing on a strip of crocheted lace on the sleeves and the crocheted lace is using a slightly darker shade of the oatmeal yarn that the sleeves are knitted in and I just love how the knitted fabric in the crochet lace just looks so good together it doesn't immediately stand out as being crochet in fact you could almost think it's just a complicated twisted stitch pattern anyway I'm a complete beginner at crochet but I've taken on a really daring project I'm going to tackle this really beautiful heirloom crocheted blanket called bohemian blooms and it's by Jane crow fit it comes in a kit and it's using a mixture of rowan yarns all of which i've used before so before you think I've gone completely mad and have become way too ambitious for myself just listen to my plan it's going to be a very slow project so like I said in the in the kit you get all of these yarns there's they're all rolling and they're all DK weight but you do have different fiber blends which is really exciting so you've got the filtered tweed and you've got the soft yak which is cotton and yak and baby merino silk which is baby merino and silk and you've got a full cotton blend which is the summer light so they're really beautiful yarns for a start so you get all of these lovely colors that the different fiber blends is going to make the blanket have a different texture look as well you get a whole lot of beading and you get this really beautiful book so the first half of the book jane talks about the inspiration behind the design and then she goes on to show you how to slowly work through the whole project so there are 41 crocheted pieces in this blanket and there's about eight or nine different designs the designs are all different shapes and sizes and for each design you have to do I think between four and two six identical repeats and the these designs are presented in order of skill levels so the techniques that are used are built on each other and become progressively more complicated as you go along so for example here you start off with this very simple striped border panel so it's going to be four of these I've just started this isn't finished yet so this is a very simple double crochet which is the UK term or single crochet striped panel and you've got four of them to do and Jane suggests that you do all four together because what's interesting is they all have to match every design piece is a different shape and size it's like a big jigsaw puzzle so we have to make sure that all of my four border pieces are exactly the same length and width so that in the end when I sew it all together it actually lays flat just what you want but it also has to match the bits on the inside though yes yeah anyway so you start off for example under very simple panel and then by the end you're really doing very fancy motives using beading color changes lots of textural and decorative stitches and also layered crochets so it's pretty darn exciting but like I said it's a very slow project I'll be - I'll be taking it you know very slow probably take me at least a year to do this is your second blanket project isn't it no I've never done a blanket you did a blanket very early your leaves oh yes when I was six years old so that's probably why I've never done one since but this is exciting so let me tell you a little bit about the inspiration for the design it's it's called bohemian blooms because it's inspired by the Bloomsbury group which were a group of painters and writers and intellectuals and artists who lived in the Bloomsbury district in London in the first half of the 20th century but during the war years a lot of them were conscientious objectors so they moved out to the country and they were working on the food farms and Vanessa Bell who is Virginia Woolf sister she she was an artist and together with Duncan grant who was also an artist they moved out to the country to a country farm house in Sussex called Charleston farmhouse and that then became the new center for the Bloomsbury group and over the next 60 years this farmhouse was decorated with amazing artwork but also with really fantastic furnishings and textiles and the farm has also had a beautiful walled English garden which became quite famous it's interesting because James says that her color palette was inspired by the painter Stanley Spencer who was also a Bloomsbury member and he used very chalky shades of brown and terracotta and pink and grey and you can see that in the design and the design itself really evokes the English gardens and countryside that was famous in this Charleston farmhouse so because I'm a complete beginner even on this very simple straight border panel I had a steep learning curve here it is here so but let me tell you a couple of the things that I've learned because it is quite fun to be learning new things the first thing I learned is that the gauge when you're doing crochet is just as important as the gauge when you're doing knitting so the very first thing I had to do obviously is to do a chain and doing a chain in crochet it's just like casting on stitches on a knitting needle but my stitch gauge had to be ten stitches four five centimeters and twenty two rows for ten centimeters and so I actually had to unpick and redo my ten stitch chain quite a few times until I got it to measure exactly five centimeters and to look neat so that was actually a surprise for me it was that a bit humbling it was humbling and a slow start but I got there in the end and so this panel is meant to be five centimeters wide and it is and I think my gauge is looking fairly consistent throughout which is good the other thing I learned about gauge with crochet is that it to help you maintain a good consistent gauge you need to hold your crochet hook parallel to your to the crochet work so you've got to work consistently holding it parallel if for instance and you may not see this in good detail but you often have just two stitches on your crochet hook and if you are working with your the point of your crochet hook tending to go upwards the second stitch is always going to be looser and that'll make you gauged slowly bigger and looser likewise if you're working tending it to be like this with the tip pointing down the second stitch here is always going to be tighter and you'll gradually get a tighter gauge so that's why it's important to make sure that you're always working parallel exactly parallel so that was fun to find out that seems to make sense yeah it does but sometimes you just you don't think of it automatically yeah the other thing is you can see that this has got four different colors in it two blue and two gray and that is actually not as simple as it might immediately look what you can do is carry the two blue at the sides that's what Jane says so you can carry these two blue yarns at the sides as floats because once you finish this panel you're going to crochet a bordered edge on both sides and that edge will will cover up those floats so that's no problem but she does suggest that these two grayish looking yarns that you actually cut and then later on weave in all the ends and I thought well I don't like doing that as you know I do a lot of stranded knitting and I have a technique when I'm knitting where I'm weaving in the end of the old yarn and the end of the new yarn as I'm little long so that when I finished a garment even if it's got 20 different colors in it I never have a whole lot of ends to weave in I have no ends to weave in I just sort of trimmed them off so I thought surely you can do the same with crochet so what I did with these gray yarns is I laid the photos under this if I laid the end of the yarn the old yarn and the end of the new yarn along the top of the crochet work and then I just double crocheted over so just worked over the top of it holding those two yarn ends over the top and that worked that is automatically woven them all in so you can see all of these itty bitty bits coming out on the side I just have to trim them off I haven't trimmed them yet because before I trim them off and when I and before I do the border panels I just want to be able to tighten them or loosen them to make sure the stitches are really even so but that's worked really well but you could see how many ends I would have to weave in if I didn't do that so I don't know if that is a crochet technique that is typically used in crochet or not but it does seem to really do the trick so that's my progress into the world of crochet and I'll keep you updated it's pretty exciting that yes something new coming up next is our interview with die Gilpin and one of the things we're gonna hear about here is or are the herring girls and these were young women who would travel up and down the UK following the herring fishing fleets they were very often young single women and they often worked in groups of three gutting salting and then packing the hearings into big barrels where there would be further transported this work gave these women a huge amount of freedom and independence and also meant that they were traveling they had to travel for the work and they also knitted and as they traveled from village to village they would swap knitting patterns so little knitting designs and that's how these things spread yeah die Gilpin is really passionate about the Gansey and she's actually done a research project and gathered the patents and also the stories behind the patterns for the Gansey of all up and down this the Scottish coast so this is a really fascinating interview I think it's a really great way to look at history yeah so enjoy this [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to fruity knitting I'm here with die Gilpin in Larrick Inge during the Shetland wool week and many of you will remember our earlier interview with die Gilpin back in episode 55 die Gilpin is a UK knitwear designer who creates very beautiful hand knitted couture collections for the catwalk and various fashion houses but she also has a really deep knowledge in traditional knitting techniques and today she's going to teach us more about the Scottish Gansey which is fantastic we did touch on that subject in our previous interview but it's really great to have her here in person so that we can go into more depth so dye welcome and thanks for joining us again it's great to see you in personal tray yeah it's amazing being here obviously on Shetland and being with you and country so it's really exciting yeah yeah thank you for asking me totally our pleasure and the viewers pleasure too so I thought before we get into some of the construction details and stitch patterns that are used in the Guernsey that you might just give us a little bit of background information or a bit of history sure and on the on the Scottish Guernsey and one thing that I thought of in it and used to confuse me is it sometimes you hear different names I can hear Gansey and Guernsey and also Jersey so maybe you could clarify sure sure well yeah there is a lot of confusion the Guernsey comes particularly from the Channel Islands and it's there was a long history of Guernsey knitting going back about 500 years and you know ending up with a machine knit Gansey which people kind of see now and recognize as as a sailor's jumper it's very simple no embellishments really apart from a really lovely kind of slightly picot cast on edge classic garter stitch bottom and a little rib but those actually are not Ganz's in the sense that we know them here in Scotland or on the north east coast of Yorkshire where I'm from orphan Cornwall the construction is completely different um in the Gansey or Gaines II and there is a Gallic word which could be could have created Gamzee which means yarn of the sea and the Norwegian word as well which is very similar these are constructed in the round and seamlessly and the Guernsey is knitted flat and machine knitted so I mean the same instantly a complete difference between the two the traditional Gansey the ones that I've looked at through the borrow further Partnership Gansey project we looked at a lot of Ganz's from Aberdeen up to wick in very north of the country and we recorded lots of patterns a lot of these were very tiny patterns and um the whole garment was knitted you know kind of fully patterned very dense very tight as you move around the coast the patterns do change you do see a difference for example in Cornwall they were knitted commercially for a period in the 18th century 19th century even before the advent of machine made wool like the poppet ins five-ply Gansey wool which is a worsted spun very very dense and with all the fibers flowing in one direction and usually colored navy on before the advent of that in Cornwall and in Yorkshire and in in Scotland they would have been spinning their own yarns and using those to make the Gansey then of course they wouldn't necessarily have been Navy they'd have been in the natural colours of the Sheep that they had to hand there was a huge knitting industry in you know the British Isles from the 13th century really and the Ganz's were just part of that whole picture but they were very refined and I think it's really interesting to look at the the historical importance of them because the depth of stitch and the complexity of the designs shows that it's a much older tradition than a lot of people would actually give it credit for so it's a fascinating area you know each area had its own little patterns but over the years those have changed and evolved as you know the advent of books and like Gladys Thompson's history of Gansey knitting in the 50s people started looking and sharing patterns around the coast and also the herring girls who were so important in the passing of those traditions down the coast they come from the Western Isles they come over to Aberdeen and they travel with the herring fleet hundreds of boats moving south with the shoals of herring and they would pick up ideas and you know sailors from different areas would see a different pattern and you know what it's like as a knitter you see a new pattern and you think wow I love that it might be the flag pattern or it might be the tree of life and suddenly you want to put it in your your own Gansey variation and and do your own variation and apparently lots of villages certainly in the Morpher area there would be one knitter in a village who had special talent in knitting and those would be the more ornate Ganz's obviously rather than the simpler versions yeah that's so interesting and we actually have a couple of great books here too which I've recently discovered so there's a lot been written about yes Guernsey even there so just we did talk about the construction in our previous interview but you go overing it again can you just summarize some of the typical constructions that are very unique to Gansey sure I mean I think one of the crucial things is that it is seamless and so you cast on and you know some areas they did a double wall cast on but not all and a lot of areas just used a cable cast on and then they would knitting around creating a love little side seam yeah which they could use as a counting mechanism to where they were within the pattern that was the purl stitch where Pearl's running up each side and obviously they were knitting on straight pins often with a sheath or a you know belt and they would go down to even like maybe a 1.5 millimeter needle which as you know is incredibly fine it's like a bicycle spoke it was incredible actually during the war they had to there was a shortage of metal and they used to use things like that to knit with yeah so going back to side scenes um these were actually a really nice device because they would knit up to the start of the gusset and use that side seam to create their increases on each side of it so it's beautifully incorporated as they made one right made one left and created their little gusset then they would divide and knit the front and then knit the back and then put them back together seam it or incorporate a shoulder strap I came to the instruction from the seam from the sleeve and then they'd make the gusset out as they knitted the sleeve out the gossip makes the makes it very wearable it means that you can stretch your arm up and around without ripping any seams or you know creating tension in the garment so it made a really good fit for an active person yeah and then they would make the necks and some areas they like to have a little gusset at the neck so that they would put in a tiny little gusset out and then the neck so it's that away from here okay because they'd have an undergarment underneath other areas they liked it very tight to the neck even with a little button on the side and other areas like I've seen a photograph in Cornwall where there was a trend for very high high ribbed necks which they could turn over a caballo neck or like a purlin neck hair or actually pull it right up to the nose so I mean there's fascinating ly interesting small changes in different air depending on what the fisherman needed different types of fishing down in Cornwall different types of fishing in the North Sea so they'd have different requirements and of course they'd have much shorter sleeves and so they didn't get caught in the rigging or in the hooks from me you know when they were fishing or the nets and get pulled overboard so very dense stitches very small needles five ply worsted yarns eventually after the use of hands BOM and usually a plainer sweater for the everyday fishing and then a more complicated you know beautiful sweater which they called their marriage sweater or their Sunday best and that would be because of the stitch patterns wouldn't it yes there are traditional knit and purl stitch patterns that we use right there they are and did you find variations when you were looking at those more a game versus between five and further up north or from the eighth diagonally I hide I can see differences yeah you know having looked at collections from five where I live from the Anstruther Fisheries Museum where I've got access to the collection there I see differences distinct differences between there the Moray Coast then down to Yorkshire where I grew up and then round to Cornwall and there's also big differences with the docks Ganz's which are much simpler they haven't got as much detail and complexity in them so yes I do see differences and obviously you see patterns traveling but there are some very distinct patterns like one that I really absolutely love is a musician's pattern from Cornwall which is very lyrical um it's a very flowing very beautiful pattern whereas others in the fleet patterns in Scotland they're often very regimented and very graphic the way that they live when they lit it so you've got some patterns here yes are they typically ones that are incorporated into the the guarantees and forget about them what sholde and so I've brought with me some samples of this this one in particular is a pair of leggings and it has a gusset which is really exciting but we've got the print of the hoof pattern which you can see running here and here on this design as well and this is a lace work prints of the hoof and you find this on the eros Kansa arizuka is a tiny island in the Outer Hebrides and they have a unique Gansey a white Gansey um which was knitted with lace panels now you wouldn't get any self-respecting fisherman to go out wearing a lace jumper apart from okay but that tradition it's a marriage Gansey it's a very special Gansey Sunday bass Sunday best that's where you'll see the lace um printed hoof and it's only a few little tiny little holes only do you think you can without so you find in the yorkshire Ganz's the print of the hoof without the lace okay what that signified was that your boat your fishing happened from a Bay without a harbor so the boats will be taken out with a horse and cart but my father actually used to do this with some of the fishermen in finally they take the boat on a trailer out with a horse across the Strand and then the boat would go into the into the sea so the fisherman from the area would have that knitted into there Ganz's Hey Wow and what about I can see here there's two different versions of The Tree of Life yes the Tree of Life which obviously is a it's kind of a it's a good luck symbol okay so you've got the openwork which you get in air escape but then the closed work which you've got here we should get on most other Ganz's and that pattern is found all over the place it's a very Universal symbol and we've also got here the Rope there's a lot of rigging a lot of things identify with the sea or with the sailing because these patents were developed during you know the age of sale so you'd have the rigging you'd maybe have harbor steps on which is like a little ladder and that indicated that your boat came out of a place with a harbor okay and then you get the lovely little joining patterns which run up and down between each of the designs and these are so fascinating I think probably the most exciting part of a Gansey because each individual knitter made up their own little joining patterns and they're just boarder that they have borders their edges but you might have like Lamaze stitches or you know to stitch rips or you might get some kind of twist and it you know there might be three stitches five stitches seven stitches and that accommodated the size of the gum and that's where you played with the mass to create the right size for the person that you okay hey okay that's great and I'm just saying this here this stitch pattern isn't it's the same diamond shape yes what's that oh this is really lovely this is the church window and it's a filled-in diamond although they do come in other in other forms they can sometimes have diamonds within or just be plain and these represent to the church windows on the coast in Fife where where I come from there's five fishing villages in a row and each of them has got its own special church and they're usually in a landmark position so that if you're sailing past you'd be able to identify which village is a neat church window has got its own shape so at night when they were lit you'd be able to know that's pit and we it's not some mornings I need to wait for the next village so they acted as landmarks are very very important to sailors you know when you're getting your bearings and you if you're saving you need to tack in sharply to get into a home yeah so that's that's where that comes from and then the tiny little one up here the is like the fishing nets and that's that we found that in Inverness so that's very much an in Vaness past okay tiny little diamonds although you do see in Cornwall as well but specifically from Inverness yeah so many beautiful stories behind these patterns isn't it yeah I mean it's amazing that's the rough the real fun of it is to you see the pattern is beautiful in themselves but then when you know what they were used for what they're connected to that just gives it life doesn't it yes it's amazing that's beautiful well die it's actually been really interesting to to learn more about this very famous historical garment but actually we're going to move back to the present day now because dye has been working on something very exciting a new project and you're going to tell us about it now aren't you yeah I'm really excited and drove for a few months I've been putting some ideas together and some stories and I've been working on a design for Andrew and it'll have it incorporate some Gansey pattern some textured patterns and the whole idea of Andrew and Andrews journey to Shetland which I think's really exciting we're completely over the moon about this we couldn't believe it but it's super exciting so we're now going to just see what she's put together and how she's incorporated these these thoughts and ideas and her designing process you've seen action yes great so the inspiration Andrea came from an amazing piece of artwork that had to make a few years ago and um I was exploring I was asked to explore Ian Stephens who's a poet and writer from the Western Isles his journey I've made a McGann Z to sail his boat in and um he asked me to record his log of his sailing from stolen away right the way around the north of Scotland and down to Sant Andrews in a piece of knitting his log was online so from setting off and he showed me see charts which I love love see charts and he showed me his route and then he'd log up online where he was and what was going on and all that something so I knitted this piece to reflect to see and the nature of the scene journeys and it goes through you know karma waters and then more difficult waters and running through it is the line of his boat as he's sailing tacking yes he's tacking through these waters pendulum Firth is a really difficult stretch of water to sail through and the Knitting only got this far because in the Pentland Firth an enormous Gale blew up and he lost the mast so and he he was shipwrecked on Orkney and he had to take the Buster's and Andrews so I'm waiting to finish this project so I just woke up in the middle of the night and I thought this is where the project is gonna end it's going to end in the garment for Andrew it's going to be your journey around Scotland but also your journey over the pen and faith and out to challenge yeah I wanted to incorporate some Gans inna Singh and I wanted to incorporate the textured cable knitting so that you have the surface of the sea and you have the stories incorporated in it and because I know Andrea likes a challenge some intarsia in this and there is the line of the boat sailing through the waters in a different color going through it so I thought it'd be a really nice challenge so I came up with this is a little sampler which shows the cabling at the sides and this will change us throughout the garment and the sleeves to show difficult waters smoother waters and then in the center there'll be a whole series of Gansey patterns framed in an Argyle diamond pattern because I thought you know the Argyle is a beautiful style of knitting and I wanted to have a little reflection of that in the story that we're creating so what I do is I first of all create my sample and then I get attention from it and in this case we're working with two different tensions we're working with the cable pattern and we're working with the flat Gansey pattern which is just stitch work I'm going to use the cable pattern to create tension and create shape and form within the design to get as we were talking earlier about a modern man's shaped jumper which is very flattering and really interesting and nice to wear so well I'll be working on that on the different tensions and how to incorporate them I'll be working on the measurements that you've given me from Andrew to get a really good fit and I'm probably going to use setting sleeves for this um and then we'll the neck is open for discussion but it'd be quite nice to maybe use one of the traditional Gansey necks yeah with the lovely little gussets here so it just sits away and would be really nice and easy to wear so those are the tensions this is the drawing and within the drawing I've put lots of lovely Gansey patterns which I'm going to choose or maybe even make up for that I'm going to put in this one here which I particularly love and there it is framed in the Argyle this is the lobster pots which I thought is you know a different style of fishing I'm also going to put in the flags it's one of my favorite patterns all Gamzee patterns are you know symmetrical so you have your center line and then on each side it's always identical and in this case you've got the rows of flags with the rigging in the middle and most sailing boats when they went into a new harbor they'd raise their flags to show their nationality where they were from so it's a very important kind of symbol I'm also probably going to put in which i think is really nice the rigging which a series of cables with you know running up with pulse stitches on each side and all also I'm going to put in the nets which are here which are the diamond shapes and form and we might throw in a few church windows yeah definitely things that relate to parts of Scotland yeah that sounds totally brilliant I'm very excited it'll make a very interesting NIT as well it will because you're working through all these different styles of knitting and you're getting a very modern contemporary look totally with lovely setting sleeves and nice long slender in the fabric you know the dark fabric which will give you a nice slender look yeah I think it'll be great and you also mentioned so we've got this diamond on the front and also the back yeah and the idea is that the patterns on the back will be different yes great for a new too if we do it in that using that as a traditional base rate you can turn it round and wear it the other way yeah so you've got two different stories going on we totally can see it's totally downs doing that it's absolutely they would do that when it got worn on the front they'd reverse it unless you know you know if if it got worn at the cuffs they actually wouldn't even bother unravelling they would just cut them off pick up and knit down maybe in a different colour because the dialogue had all changed or the yarn had changed or whatever so we're getting a little bit of that you know Gansey history in there totally and we can tell a different story on the back to the front yeah it's great knit us love that I mean because they don't personally I knit sleeves differently yes to different a back and a front differently means you just get to experience more different Gandipet yes and getting so that excites very excited and we might even invent a few yes maybe a couple of Australian maybe calf Australian yes well we've just got to get Andrew he's behind the camera at the moment we could get him on because he's complete as you can imagine he's over the moon to have died gilt and design him and a jumper can you believe it very sweet thank you so absolutely I'm totally flattered to be receiving this view from you and at least the story is absolutely because my family actually came from the area that you're living in now my face is Incred I didn't even know this and it just it just it came to me that this had to be your pattern yeah so strange our understanding is that they were fishermen so that is completely beautiful completely suitable and yeah and we obviously have traveled across the globe yeah back in 1835 they traveled out to Australia amazing and now we're back here in Shetland and even have your own Gansey I'm gonna have a beautiful Gamzee I'm very excited yeah well thank you for watching us and and we got to hear a lot today a lot more about the Gangi but also to see how we've gone from it talking about a very historic garment to a very modern garment but yeah with all of these some historical connotations so in connections so it's been great it's been fantastic yeah thank you okay [Music] so tell how do you like being die Gilpin's mused well it's pretty big responsibility I've got them in that role pretty flattering I'm very flattered very exciting yeah yeah it's cool I'm excited to knit it die Gilpin works a lot with fashion houses where she designs special hand knitted garments as part of their collection when they're putting them on the on the runway and she's very busy right now finishing off a collection for a fashion house and then straight after that she's going to finish this design for Andrew so I should be able to start knitting it sometime in April that'll be really exciting good yeah I need a new jumper yes you do dye is offering all fruity knitting patrons attempt sent discounters for all yarns kits and patterns in her online store which is really fantastic dyes leyland yarn is made from Scottish lamb's wool and she also has another special yarn which is a blend of Scottish lamb's wool and cashmere so that's really special thank you very much to die yeah and the colors are really beautiful very unique shades of colors that blend very well together so I'm going to give you an update now of my nightingale designed by Nora GaN and it's a part of this book here which is the latest edition of the pom pom magazine if you haven't seen our very last episode you've got to go back and watch it because there's two interviews in there one with Megan Fernandez who is one of the co-founders of the magazine and the other one is with Norah GaN who was the guest editor for this edition and it's they're really great interviews but especially if you're going to knit one of these patterns I think it's really inspiring to hear and talk about it yeah it's good to have the extra background there yeah so here we go here's my nightingale I've done the front and the back pieces together they've been blocked I am really happy with it I love the way it looks can you see this this lovely cable design here I always knit my hair into the garment you can see it's just like a shield the shape of it it's very beautiful so I'm very thrilled with it just get rid of the little ends you might remember that in the last episode I talked about a lot of puckering happening here that I wasn't sure I was going to be able to get rid of well I have and so I'll tell you how I did it both the so it's the garments new certain pieces and bottom laps so I've completed the front and the back and I just soaked them both in water for about thirty minutes and then I just lay them flat I didn't pin it all out just lay them flat but I did pin this section here where the cable crosses over I really stretched those stitches so that the puckering would be would lose would lose the puckering underneath so I'll show you a very close-up picture of that you can see where I've placed the two pins those stitches in between we're really stretched wide and that seemed to really smooth out the puckering underneath so hopefully they won't sort of spring back you know with a bit of memory to how they used to be and the other thing is you can see that right there it's slightly thinner the cable is slightly thinner but I don't think that matters I still think it's really beautiful so there's the front piece here's the back piece which is exactly the same except it's a little bit higher up here you can see that motive comes up there which is cute so two beautiful pieces very exciting I'm gonna wear this at the NBN Festival mm-hmm yeah there'll be one of my jumpers and I've done one of the sleeves and the sleeve has got really interesting shaping on so I have to show you about that so I need your hands again edges so again if the set-in sleeve knitted from the bottom up what I'm gonna I'll show you how it looks here first so it's a lovely elegant sleeve you can see that the cuff the ribbing on the cuff is really quite long and it's a combination of a 2 by 2 rib and a 1 by 1 rib where the single knit stitch is actually twisted and that pattern continues up the sleeve in a Center in a central panel and the two stitch ribbing actually gradually increases to become a wider panel of stocking stitch so what the interesting part is the bell shape at the so while you're decreasing along here to form the bell shape you're actually increasing in these central panels they're like that so the top of it is actually going to be quite wide and then in your very last row you decrease a lot of stitches at the same time as casting off and that means you've got that that kind of gathered bit at the top right at the top of the sleeve cap which is really beautiful and so that'll sit on the sleeve like that like a puffed sleeve like a very Edwardian styled puffed sleeves yeah yeah so the yarn is Alastair Moore's hybrid and three ply in the colorway Pebble Beach I'm thrilled with it it's it's really interesting it's very clever yes I'm really impressed by this sleeve I mean the pattern on the front and the back is obviously really spectacular but this I find it using the shaping yeah yeah just and also because it's so simple but it's still really elegant and and adds a real interest to the sleeves yeah it's it's a great design so Andrew what are you knitting yeah of course so I am knitting on your hiking jacket so it's coming along I can show you a bit more of what I've done later but first of all I did want to show you the concept diagram that Andrea is hand drawn to show how it should look when it's completed hopefully yeah yep so I've completed the back that was the first part that I did if you could help me please and just cover like this you don't need to look at it okay so there's the back it's pretty plain stocking stitch bit of armhole shaping here and ribbing at the bottom that's finished so it's really cool we have the right front get it up the right way so this is the right front which is also complete and then we can start to see the features of the the design we should I put it up against me yeah do that so in the end we opted for a fairly simple wiggle cable down there sort of down the middle here so that's really cool I think it looks good and I think it's a nice placement what we're going to have is an icord bind off at the very edge and then there'll be a zipper which is real cool we could do really violently different colors zipper like bright orange yeah right rude yeah a contrast zipper that could be really cool and then because I've got that job I'm gonna do the double over collar I could do a stripe or something just on the inside of it yeah that could be cool this breakthrough live on international television let's see so that's the basic plan what else yeah the cable I've been doing the cable without the cable needle and actually if you go back you may see me struggling a little bit sometimes it essentially works but sometimes I have trouble getting the needle back in and splitting threads so but yeah just and sometimes you simply forget to sometimes I forget yeah I'm just racing along so fast they just go whizzing past and I have to go back which but I think it's actually good I'm quite happy now I was for a long time I was worried about what cable I'd do but I think that's just a nice elegant wiggle yeah so there'll be two Biggles on either side of perhaps of violently colored super yeah sounds cool so I'm working on the second front heel out working on the second front here that's coming along all fine I was thinking how we at some point we figured out what proportion of the overall netting the sleeves represent it's quite a lot they're surprisingly wide because the widest part of this the sleeve can be almost as wide as it back almost yeah yes yeah yeah I mean I tried yeah I'll help you I did consider pushing the idea of a hiking vest I'm not gonna window on [Music] hi there I'm Tasha lonely and I would design it behind moonstruck Miss Emma Andrew asked me to tell you something about my latest patent release which is for a show called Luna and of course I'm very very happy too much Lunas most prominent design features in my opinion are the horizontal and vertical was a bad and since mosaic is the slip stitch caliber technique it tends to tighten your fabric a bit when you work a that's because of the sipping of the stitches and the floods so I like to combine mosaic knitting with stitch practices that also have this feature so for the the natural sections over here I use the cluster stitch pattern which Waterwalker called star stitch and I think they go really really good together it almost gives the shawl of open appearance which I I really I really like I adore the mosaic technique I've used it before it's so much fun to do it's easy you only hold one strand at all times and it produces these very beautiful bags of high contrast geometric color you could also work some texture into your mosaic 'aa I think the possibilities are endless and for this show knowing my chalice was up to myself was that I wanted to use it horizontally and very urgently of course you were a horizontally saw I had to come up with a construction of the shell to make the mosaic appear vertical so what I did was the following I'll take it off so I can show you the construction I hope it will be visible what I did was I started the upper body of the shawl over here with only a few stitches then I worked my way down in star stage Breton ruin mosaic and increasing to get this triangle shape at the center of I started decreasing and even a few stitches over there and also the upper body was finished I picked up the stitches at the lower edge and started working down I think this adds interest and also I'm not bulimic really neat you got that right now you can see you can throw it on and it will look good inspiration behind this design I always find it hard when people ask me what my inspiration behind a certain design is because I see so many things we have our social media I go to movies I go to exhibitions I live in this city of accident which also gives me a lot of visual input so two big points one inspiration sources all that will always fight for me but I think this show would not look the way it does now if I hadn't been to higher - last year I was mesmerized with all the beautiful textiles theorized that the towels the garments even and I think that all trickled down and left in a way to this design one is a very natural not too beautiful market are the tassels you see them everywhere there on the right there on the garments and I think that if it's all just that little extra if you don't like that sauce you can leave them off it will look good anyway but this in my opinion is just a little more disaster so I think that is the story behind Renee and I hope you like it it was so nice to tell you thank you very much [Music] so thank you Natasha so much for showing it's your really stunning design I think it's a super elegant design yeah and like she said the combination of the slip stitch and the star pattern from Vera Walker's stitch dictionary it really makes it a woven yeah fabric that's a that's a really cool effect yeah and if you look on the project page and you just check out other people's versions of that design you can see some really interesting color combinations and I actually thought that might be something that you could tackle one day yeah fairly soon yeah I would certainly consider that and I haven't you know from the one show but that's quite a while ago so yeah um I didn't want to mention fruity knitting patrons can receive a 20% discount off all of Natasha's self-published patterns in her Ravelry store yeah Natasha is a super stylish woman and her designs are really gorgeous yeah the jumper that she's wearing in that in that presentation is also a recent design it's called Dion and I think it is really groovy so enjoy looking through her store and thank you very much Natasha there's just so many interesting things to knit yeah so we want to thank all of our wonderful patrons again for continuing to finance the show we're really appreciated like we said our main goal for the first half of this year is to make sure that the workload is sustainable and to do that we'd really like to have Andrew working on the show full-time with me and that is would be a very exciting thing would get to do a lot more we'd even get to travel to more festivals which would be brilliant that's very doable if more about regular viewers become patrons so if you're enjoying the show please do become a patron thank you yeah thank you also from me coming up now is our interview with Elaine Jamison and her son Gary both of Jemison's of Shetland this is a really fun interview we assure you're going to enjoy it yeah oh and we also want to announce that Elaine and Gary are offering fruit in knitting patrons a 10% discount of everything in their online store this includes their famous spindrift yarn which is the jumper weight yarn they've got DK and Aran weight and lace weight yarns in a huge variety of colors I think there's 220 in total but they also sell knitting needles and accessories and knitting belts so if you've ever thought about trying out a knitting belt this could be an opportunity for you so thank you very much to Jamison's of Shetland we've had a great time today so thank you very much for being with us and we'll be back in two weeks time bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to fruity knitting I'm here on a very beautiful part of Shetland it's very remote but very beautiful Sandnes is on the western coast of the mainland and to get here Andrew and I drove on a very long narrow winding road across more lands which were studded with little lakes and freely roaming Shetland sheep and some Shetland ponies was really atmospheric it felt like it really should be or it could easily be the set of the next Jane Eyre movie and yes Oh sadness is the home of the Jameson's of Shetland woollen mill which is the fifth generation family-run business and whose yarn many of you already know and really love and with me today is Elaine Jameson hello and her son Gary Jameson and they're going to share with us today the very interesting story of their family business so I'm really thrilled to be here and I'm really happy that both of you are on fruity knitting so thank you well thank you for having us yeah it's good so Jameson's of Shetland started in the late 1890s and the ups and downs of your family business has is really like a mirror of the story of the wool industry and knitting in Shetland so can you just tell us how your family business has evolved over the last hundred years or so and how you've actually managed to diversify and therefore survived okay well after try and cram in 100 years here I'll give it a bash so in early 1918 90s I should say Robert Jameson my great grandfather opened the small village shop here in Sanus where we still are today and at that time he would have been trading for tea sugar that's sort of domestic goods that a crawfish couldn't grow on their own lines-- for their hand-spun hand knitted at home garments and they would have been anything from feral sweat to lacework HAP's but also a lot of like underway of that kind of things that was all wool back in those days and he would have been exporting those garments outside of Shetland and this was really a bit of a lifeline for the crafters because there wasn't really much money at that time in the islands so people really were selling them to to survive as that home produce tarted the decline Andrew that would have been Robert's son started to buy in raw fleece and move that off to the mainland Scotland for processing he would have been then taken yarns back to Shetland for hang knit and again at home too to export again off the island so it was really just to keep that industry moving even though people weren't doing so much hand spinning at the time um and then we kind of move along that sort of moved along to the 1950s till Betty that was a Andrew son open the first retail shop that we have in in Larrick and that was really the start of the Jameson's knitwear brand and the many of the main purposes of that shop was really to sell to local tourists they would have been starting to come in at that time but also at the same time the local wealth was increasing and people were were had more money in their pocket to buy nice things for themselves and that sort of continued on for about ten years till we came into 1960s and we were we were still producing knitwear to order and there really started to become a big demand for plain single colored Shetland wool sweaters now again that was well it would have been would have been boss really there would have been please some plain stuff and and waste work as well yeah that would have continued I made hank nitin yes machine yes so well the times yeah the 1960s came it would been hand flat machine knitting and I mean it really was a mainstay in Shetland at the time most houses would have been would have been producing or helping to produce knitwear who supplemented that in their incomes absolutely so again a need to survive but this this need for this want for these plain Shetland sweaters came in and that was when my grandfather had the vision or the idea that he wanted to produce a holy Shetland product so he really wanted to have a yarn made from our rule made into sweater and sent off the elements so started to manifest but it was really and that sort of I really was just an idea until really lated in the 1970s when Peter that's badly sorry my father came into the business after he left the school and it was him and Beth tea together that set up the small experimental milk that we put together it was very very basic we had one old carding machine one old spinning flim and through really just very much homemade equipment I mean they would wash wool in a bath and spin it in a domestic dryer and they heat up a rack that they would lifting certain blasts with a gas furnace to dry the wool off and I didn't know with a with a lemon he'd bottle every way so it really was very much primitive and experimental at the time because we were told that it was really the Shetland wool was too fragile to be knit to be spun commercially on canal machinery but we never believed that so but as you can see we've got a couple of examples here of some of the very very first yarns very first yeah yeah that we actually managed to produce quite thick yeah that's what's this an errand boy no this is supposed to be jumper weight but as you can see it's a bit lumpy ABAB lumpy and the twist is not maybe just incredibly smooth and it's this is the original this is in the museum archive which is all this we have I'm sorry but I mean as you can see from the yarn it became very obvious very quickly that was very very possible to do that in fact even the handle of this old stuff here it's still soft you still got that and that's also 40 years old yes yes so prior to that what place were they using they just they were taken Shetland fleece but they would have been blending it with heavier English bleed scam they said it was to make Shetland wool stronger but we are maybe firmly of the opinion that it was really making the cost of a bleed smoother and so there was telling us one thing but it was really okay so in the 1970s of course the oil industry came to the islands and with that became much bigger opportunities for the local council to support indigenous industries but at the same time new industries as well and with their help they built the buildin that well we're still in today the fight through the first factory and if it hadn't been for that we certainly wouldn't be producing yams like we are today so in 1981 the year I was born then I don't remember well imagine um we started the the buildin work started here and a few years previous to that my father started to travel down to the lakes of Yorkshire areas and Galashiels that kind of places it started to look at machinery with a view of potters and some of all the big heavy proper industrial cotton machines and spinning frames to take up to fill them fill the factory here thank you and we're still using all of those machines today we've replaced one or two but literally it's just one off to about nearly forty years old well the and they won't new when they came here okay no absolutely not you know some of the machinery in here is very very old I mean for example the skeleton facility we have some of that parts is very old that's one of the squeeze heads is over 100 years old but it's just a big old lump of cast iron of tons very slowly it's got all new belts on you more there's all new gearboxes but the actual frame what guess they'll nest or so and then so moving along 1985 December 1985 we very excited that we had the official opening of the factory here I was only four so I was probably not just in the in the party but it was a proud moment for the family had gone full circle really hides and applied a moment for sort of the the textile industry all together so now we've got this yarn were producing a yarn a good yarn and we very quickly came to realize that we couldn't produce enough so in 1986 we extended the factory but unfortunately just on the tail end of us managing to complete that project and we had a big dent on in the network industry in the islands which is what we really wanted to be producing for so we had to diversify and maybe had to do so quite quickly I think would be fair to say but luckily we'd already been started to experiment with other things but through a very useful meeting with a man called David codling from a company called its motto Factory through his help we really pushed forward our high net yawns to really incorporate most of the the range we still have today yeah and that was exciting for net where designers besides um but that was only one half of what we did we'd also been experimenting in our network because we'd already bought our first computer-controlled machine so we were doing this type of net where that I'm wearing today we were trying to experiment with machine nets fair isles to try and replicate fair well as much as we possibly could and we'd also started our small tweet program that we do as well so we've got a very small small leaves here so we do this sort of shetland to eat as well but as you can imagine it's been a lot of hard work and a lot of millet late nights but so now the meal is due is completing the all of the stages of yarn production yes doing everything from the raw greasy flea straight off the sheep's back to the beautiful colored and dyed yarn and that's been spun up into a ball already and put on with a fresh label so just really quickly give it a rundown of the basic process what that is from the raw fleece coming in okay so we yes as you say we buy the fleece directly from the farmers the local crafters and the first job is to grade that fleece so we're only trying to use the best Shetland fleece that we can get our hands on and we're still trying to buy wool from people who have a lot of the Shetland breed of sheep there are a lot of sheep and Shetland which are not Shetland sheep if that makes sense no I have seen them yes so through careful grading and I do mean careful we hand grade absolutely every single fleece we can hopefully read out those cross spread animal fleeces and take that away and only keep the best best for our own use but once we get it to stage were happy with it we go on to scour the police so we put it through what we call the fleece bacon which is basically a big machine which pulls that fleece apart gives it a good shake trying to shake out as much of the of the foreign materials that's in there in the fleece before dumping it into some nice hot water so basically nice hot soapy water three big tanks there but 50 degrees centigrade we want to be careful we don't damage the fiber and as it gets pushed through the scarran's tanks that should come out cleaner between each mini between each tank we dry it out and for storage then we will use the yarn the wool as its own colors because we do have the natural color but more common of course is a dyed when we've got behind me here so yeah into the dye pot with two men die tanks one that we go straight onto the wool we try to use that one as much as we can because we're doing a natural product all the wool we'll take the yarn that will take the dye slightly definitely sorry and we kind of because it's still got a lot of the process and to go through any imperfections will be almost item doubt and to the naked eye you would hardly see it and then the other type we use that one for doing onto the clean spun yarns right onto the scheme so we do that for like bleached whites bright yellows baby pastel colors that again because there's not good the opportunity to get dirty and some sponsors yeah nice to the factory once we've got our wool died on the wool and we move along to do some color blending so we're taking three or four different colors and we're mixing those together to make something a little bit more interesting than just the plain yeah yeah the heathered yarns so we're taking maybe two or three or even anything up to maybe seven different colors and mixing those together to give something a little bit more interesting and this is what our shared card has really become quite long the one for yeah once it's the wools kind of mixed together it was ready for the cauda machine Cardin's a very simple process not changed for thousands of years we're really just attempting to calm that fleece to take away any lumps one of the problems with our old cotton machine was it couldn't it couldn't carve it enough but with the big heavy industrial plant you can you can smooth out any imperfections as the car the wool comes off the end of the Carter machine it's cut into these fine strips and the eccentric motion of the rubbers at the back end creates these pencil robins that are gathered on the onion tubes at the back then on to the spinning spinning again simple process we're just adding twists but at the same time we stretch the yarn a little bit we have to stretch it to adjust the final thickness of the of the yarns to make sure that every individual color comes out Sam we would we would spin everything in a single ply obviously and and the foreplay the 21 cut as we call it that is that's the gala count for the single ply that's our most common yes certainly our most common but we do another two weights as well we do the nine cut and that's the one that we make into our arm weights and the bulky they're chunky width and then we do a very fine one as well the 32 cut which is our ultra weight yeah so we've got that cobweb yarn as a single ply and then we light up to me that's okay so there's a few more processes after we had no choice mental ailment so if you worked on every every aspect of it maybe - yeah yeah I'm all of us in this building we hate fish pretty multitask it depends who folds up on a Monday monitors I've got the flu I can't come in we have a build step into their shoes so Elaine have I saw Gary getting into one of the dye pots and and pushing that yes Lisa done have you done that no I can't get it to washable either she seems to science do smell I don't know practice makes perfect yeah okay great so what's your favorite I actually like carbon and spinning yeah it's very therapeutic yes you you put the wool then and you're really it really is where the wool goes from wool to a finished article and it's kind of nice we also like ballin as well it's kind of fun you get to see all the pretty yeah and it's again it's a finished post a connect for something and moving along to finish yeah I think to do twisting ball and Hank and Corning yeah sort of I mean ain't things I think you can see there's other stuff as well great so we have to talk about the color palette now because it's really a designer's dream there's over 220 colors and they were developed over the last 25 years as you can see I'm wearing a Marie Wallen design which is I think it uses I'm not sure I've measured it last year but I think 16 colors they all blend so beautifully together so we need to know about the color palette was there a concept or is there a concept behind that color palette well it's really sort of a complement our machine net and so things I've got a few examples of an old shade cart yet I mean that's really where we started back in the 80s and it very quickly became much bigger as you can see and then of course we move along to our brand new one which we've just think we've got the Naturals here and then all the way onto this so as you can see it it has evolved but unfortunately evolved very quickly our storeroom can hardly keep up but yeah we need them so we we continue to produce these things ok and Elaine has just got a massive bundle of swatches here so Elaine you get so many customers coming in and asking you how to work with colors don't you so I thought we'd just grab a few different colors here and you could just tell us typically you know what how you advise them well most people come in and they are looking for quite bright patterns no this is the very first pattern that we made on our commercial computer machines and those are the colors which are quite bright and you wouldn't think they would work together but as you can see they do you can change it very little by idn't just gray instead of the mullet so it's practically the same I does change it a little so basically here the the main patterns are the same but the sort of the background is appearing there is natural Marat and which is the brown color a Shetland brown and here's natural grain yes yes yes and the they obviously where do we start so we would probably start with the base color and you can change it very quickly by using a completely different background color or a different sheets now we also have very heavy shields and muted colors now those are muted colors and that is what it looks like when you get it knitted those are easy to blend and this is the sort of thing you would achieve yeah much subtler yeah that's because there's always a little bit of almost every color in the yarn isn't there yes yeah yes they're moving teacher that this these ones are quite close where this is a little bit darker yeah and purples yeah but then you can change anything that you want by just often yet call us these are all the same pattern but they've just got different colors that's amazing isn't it yeah Wow okay you can see that you can see here for instance you've used a very plain blue color as the background in here you've used more of a heathered color and that's got these shades in it so these are more blending effect how many colors in this pattern in this button we have 13 different colors for thought so when you're putting together a new fare our design do you start with the background colors and then put the pops in or how do you yes and we can change things very easily on the machine it's not like stuttering that when you're noting by hand you've got to go up all the way through your swatch see you can just add the cornices in the same machines and it will just produce and it will be easy and within 10 minutes you say no that doesn't work and then you can do something else you can introduce a different color a darker blue or a black or a green or just something completely different and it does change it drastically as you can see because you wouldn't think those were the same these were all the same pattern you just using all different colors yeah yeah but they could change very little or then they can change a great deal and depending on your choice whether you'd like bright what do you like shuttle I think more designers need to buy themselves knitting machines one of the hardest things about knit machine of course is the program inside of things it's to develop a fair isle program with 13 colors and it's really taking these machines to that extreme so but it's something we've become known for so that's one of our our selling points lots and call us enough they around yeah and that's what your dad like to do it's well that's what he has to do no it was his it was his idea and and he has developed that really as far as we possibly can and they also produce woven materials there's Shetland tweed and Shetland blankets so yeah what is everyone is heard or most people have heard of Harris Tweed what are the special qualities of Shetland tweed well Shetland tweeds a lot softer one of the one of the great things about our tweets is we are using the the single ply twin one cut Jana we spoke about a little while ago so there's the single strand of like our spender for example but it's quite soft it's not really ideal for poor tweet you want something with a lot more twist in there to give it strength but through careful weaving really now we've got to be very careful we can produce this really nice soft cloth so slaughter do but at the far side of its once you actually get it produced it's got a lovely handle to it it's really soft as we really nice next to the skin but and it and it kind of keeps the characteristic if the Shetland wool as well you've got this kind of little bit of hair going on there like halo I suppose that some people speak about and of course as you can see from the blanket we have here the color palette is somewhat of a help as well so it gives it gives ourselves some some real scope for design I think you can knit yourself a jumper and make yourself a skirt and it's out of the same yeah are you gonna match yes just well with you jump yeah absolutely but it's it's war time you'd be warm if you had on a tweed skirt and I don't shell and we'll spy though your customers for the for the tweed was mostly Italian yes traditionally and we've also moved into making our own garments yeah just in the last few days yeah yeah as an avenue of use enough to be anything else that's a really beautiful cape isn't it it's it's somewhat unique difference does yeah slippers handbags different things using the tweak yeah yeah right and you've got a very special waiver Brian oh yes yes he's he's probably forgotten more about weaving than the national I don't know he's been in the trade for 45 years and he would never see himself as designer although he put all these colors together everything that we have he's put together and he would just described himself as a weaver and you know a very modest man but the talented definitely he's a real gold nugget okay so you spoke earlier about how the business has evolved over the last hundred years so that you could survive what are you doing now how are you managing now to keep the meal modern and relevant to today's market well it's a lot to look after I think I'm here to say we've we've just got to try and keep going with the mass of yarn range the Tweed the knitwear there's not really much more we can do with with Yun's I'm sure there's probably somebody out there that could suggest something but we really just got to try and can you keep keep the wheels moving yeah you know you're everywhere around you know you know and around on all around in the Knitting world so that's that's great so I mean one of the things we have done in to try and keep ourselves more cotton as we put us computer control system into yarns as they're moving through the factory just to speed things up to try and keep as as we have so many colors it can be really confusing sometimes where some things are in that long process that was talking about so that was an idea just they're kind of using a barcode system to keep moving well I can really say your strong passion for and interest in the family business and I bet your mom and dad are so happy that you've got such an emotional well an emotional investment in the business because it is a fifth-generation business and and you're happy and excited about continuing it on but the other thing is a family business is really just a family lifestyle isn't it it's not nine-to-five work you're probably thinking about it all the time so how do you all manage to live and work so closely together and to have done so through multiple generations oh no we do get on we get on well I mean I I left University from doing an engineering degree to come home to do this job it was something that I wasn't pushed into now none of our family was my sister also works in the business full-time Louise and she looks after all of our sort of dispatch said things but the same time just helps us we often laugh about haven't bored me so a cup of coffee you know and that really is as were packing the van on its with Larrick and we'll we'll chat about what needs to be done tomorrow you know but we do get on reasonably well yeah I just your winter holiday together are you mad we did last year's the whole all the fun all our all our children and their families there was 17 of us all together we went to Portugal yeah medieval us together yeah every age from 2 to 62 yeah I mean a great time yeah we did yeah we did we we struggle on but we managed to keep keep friends that's wonderful that's a really great story well thank you so much for spending time with us and our viewers it's it's been really great to hear the inside story well thank you for coming thank you very much for coming it's really tough on you good okay let's say goodbye to the viewers [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you you

Channel: Fruity Knitting

Views: 65,262

Keywords: Knitting, Jamiesons, Shetland, Gansey

Id: NL9Fkpztn2c

Length: 88min 20sec (5300 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 29 2019