A Hebridean Weaver’s Garden

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Mike HTA

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Staff and students at Nottingham Trent University are celebrating today after winning a prestigious Gold Award at the Chelsea Flower Show. The University won the coveted award with its traditional 1950′s Hebridean weaver’s garden, designed by student Jackie Setchfield. It was one of four 5x4m gardens entered into the popular artisan section of the centenary show.

Students from across the University’s horticulture courses helped to develop theMotor Neurone Disease – A Hebridean Weaver’s Garden with Jackie, who is studying a foundation degree in garden design in the University’s School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences.

Jackie’s design depicted a garden on the Isle of Lewis, brimming with dye plants, the extracts of which would have been used to dye fleece, and woven to create our famous Harris Tweed cloth. The garden was intended to be a nostalgic look back to an arduous way of life within these tight knit communities, which continued here in the Hebrides until the late 1960s.

As well as a black house structure it includes a spinning wheel, dye pot and a range of dye plants available in the middle of the last century – including ladies bedstraw, bog myrtle, bogbean and knapweed. There is a stream – or burn – with small waterfalls, along with wetland plants, wildflowers such as harebell, foxgloves and tufted vetch, as well as heathers, ferns, a tree and a small kitchen garden growing potatoes, onions and cabbages.

The brief for the garden was provided by Motor Neurone Disease Association co-founder, Martin Anderson and it was created to help raise awareness of the charity. Martin also worked alongside the university five years ago, when his Shetland-inspired show garden won the coveted gold award and the People’s Choice Award at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Jackie said: ”The most challenging aspect of the project was probably the meticulous research and planning which went into this. I was honoured to have the assistance of all sorts of people eager to help, from the charismatic curator of blackhouse museum on Lewis, the staff at the Harris Tweed mills, to the esteemed librarians at RHS Wisley.

“I visited the Isle of Lewis to source some of the plants, garden features and materials included in the design to ensure that it was as authentic as possible. It was also vital to feel the atmosphere of the islands themselves, to capture their wild romantic spirit and translate that essence into the build.”

Congratulations to all involved!

How To Make Harris Tweed Pt.3

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Mike HTA

Now the time comes to weave the cloth.

By statutory Act of Parliament, the weaving of Harris Tweed may only be done within the homes of the islanders in the Outer Hebrides. What’s more, no automation is allowed. To this day, every inch of Harris Tweed is produced by human power alone, simple pedals used to drive the loom mechanisms.

The warp and yarns for the weft arrive from the mill, (a single-width loom weaver will warp their beam themselves) and then the weaver sets to work. A major part of the task is the setting up of the loom itself, changing the draft to the correct pattern, using the correct pick wheel, hand-tying on the new yarns to the tail-ends of the previous weave, to make it easier to thread onto the loom. It can be a painstaking and time-consuming process, even after years of practice.

A weaver can produce around 100 – 150 metres of Harris Tweed a week depending on their other crofting activities and demands on their time. The cloth is pulled from their looms when complete, carefully folded in a specific way and tied in neat bundle ready to be returned to the mill where the first task will be to check it for any imperfections.

Every inch is carefully scrutinised by an eagle-eyed darner, usually on a light table or by being pulled over a back lit wooden beam. Any broken or stray threads are darned and mended. If the weaver makes too many errors he may find his fees are reduced to pay for the costs. But that rarely ever happens, as it’s a matter of local pride to produce a fabric that’s as near perfect as possible.

The Harris Tweed cloth is now nearly ready. It just needs to go through a few final processes. The first is to give it a good wash, to remove all remaining impurities and oils in cold water. Washing and beating or waulking, has two important effects. Firstly it cleanses the cloth and eliminates excess lanolin, oils, dirt, and other impurities. And secondly, it makes the material softer and thicker.

Once done by hand, today the machines used are in effect a miniature version of these actions, the rotational action drives out the impurities, whilst stretching and slightly matting the fibre, improving both its softness and resilience.

It’s important to time the process carefully, which varies depending on the volume of fabric. Too short and the wool would still feel too greasy with the sheep’s natural oils. Too long and the fabric would matt, becoming too felt-like. But of course with long practice it’s always just right.

The cloth is nearing the end of it’s journey, next time we’ll look at the final stages of the process, almost there!

How To Make Harris Tweed Pt.2

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Mike HTA

Carding is the process by which the individual wool fibers are individually straightened and sorted into separate fibers. Over a series of stages, this process converts a continuous matted web of fibres into individual ribbons of fine threads.

The machine (or, technically, series of machines in one long process) mechanically mimics the effect of hand-teasing and carding using spiked wooden paddles. This pulls the hairs into the same orientation to assist their spinning into thread, fluffing the wool as it develops. The process also helps remove any remaining dirt or plant matter, which would both weaken and coarsen the finished yarn.

The woolen mixture is carried through a series of rollers, each fitted with thousands of tiny spikes. In this way the fibers are caught and straightened as they are carried from one stage to the next.

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A conveyor moves the wool first to ‘nippers’, which deliver a steady flow of the fibre onto the ’swift’. This transfer straightens the fibers, and the swift’s card cloth then carries these fibers past the worker/stripper rollers to the ‘fancy’. The worker roller turns more slowly relative to the swift, which reverses the fiber. The faster stripper then pulls fibers from the worker and passes them on again to the swift.

Over several stages, with the same process repeating from one machine to the next, this teasing and carding pulls the fibers increasingly parallel. And as it moves through, the wool becomes progressively fluffier and lighter.

Now that the base colours are fully mixed into the desired shade, and carded into the right consistency, the fiber is ready for to be spun into yarn. First it needs to be made into a loose thread.

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The Roving machine picks up the fibers on ribbons, pulling just the right number through to make a very loosely organised thread. This thread has just enough strength to be wound ready for spinning. But it remains so loose that it can be easily pulled apart with the slightest tension.

For the yarn to have the strength required for weaving, it now needs to be spun into strong thread.The spinning is literally that – twisting it around 6-8 times, which gives the yarn a great deal more tensional strength.

The loose threads from the previous stage are wound onto a long bobbin. The yarn is gently pulled from here, down through a twister and onto the yarn cones below. At this stage it can still break easily, so the machine needs to be constantly tended.

Due to the loose thread’s fragility, the speed at which the spinner can operate is limited. But a large number of yarn cones can be wound in parallel at the same time so the highly skilled spinner is seldom idle.

The Warp is the long, lengthwise group of threads in weaving, through which the crosswise ‘Weft’ threads are interwoven to create its pattern. Because these threads are continuous, they must be organised in groups of the right sequence in advance.

The cones of Harris Tweed coloured yarns (each of which, remember, is formed from its own unique mix of base colours) are first arranged into the right layout, so that each thread comes off it in the right position for its own unique position in the pattern.

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The threads are then arranged in groups on the warping frame, in lengths that might vary from just a few yards (metres) for a short weave – say, for a single garment – up to eighty yards or so for a full ‘piece’ (the standard unit of a full weaving length). The warping frame needs enough pegs for the longest warp to be strung between them without a break.

Once hundreds of warping threads have been laid out for the full width of the loom where it will be woven (which may be either ’single’ or ‘double’ width) they are wound up into hanks, and sent out to the weaver’s home, ready for the weaving itself.

How To Make Harris Tweed Pt. 1

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Mike HTA

Huge bales of clean, white, 100% pure new wool arrives at the Harris Tweed mills ready to being the journey to becoming genuine Harris Tweed. The first stage is dyeing and Harris Tweed is truly dyed in the wool i.e. we dye the wool prior to it being spun as opposed to dyeing spun yarn. This means we can blend different coloured wools to create a myriad of intricate shades and hues.

The wool has been previously been compressed into tight bales – and they truly are tight. These bales are in turn loaded into stainless steel containers and then loaded into the dye vats. Here the dye is forced into the wool under high pressure, chemicals owing their origins to processes from the 16th century being used to help fix the dyes. The bales are used for stock or high use colours.

Most of the dyes used are organic natural dyes that are removed from the water through the processing system the mill uses or go to an outside water treatment company. The emerging wool must then be dried and this is done by a simple combination of spin drying and tumble drying in warm air to remove the remaining moisture.

With a stock of basic colours to hand, the work of blending them to create an almost infinite variety of potential shades of yarn begins. From just a few dozen colours, almost any natural hue can be created. The base colours are, often very vibrant and evocative of aspects local landscape or its fauna. It is practically impossible to separate Harris Tweed from the land that is its source and inspiration.

There is a tried and tested formula for almost any shade desired. Two, three, four, or more based colours are selected in precise proportions, to create the exact yarn colour required. These are then carefully weighed out just like measuring ingredients on a kitchen scales.

Once the proportions of each wool have been weighed and gathered, the first task is simply to break them up roughly together, ready for blending. They are manually torn apart into pieces, and tossed together to produce a roughly distributed mix. This continues as the fragments are torn into smaller pieces, creating a kaleidoscopic array of colour.

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This stage of the process does not have to be very precise. The aim is simply to avoid any overly large clumps of any single colour, as that would risk one shade predominating in areas of the finished fabric.

Once the base colours are roughly mixed together, the wool is dropped into an underground vacuum pipe. This carries it into a large mixing machine. A conveyor feeds the mixture into, in effect, a shredder. This breaks up the hand-separated clumps of the base colours into smaller pieces, producing a much finer blend.

From a distance the final composite shade this will produce is already starting to appear. But up close the granularity of colours is richly evident in every handful. The finer granularity means that all the ingredient colours will now be present in a single handful.

This mixture is now sufficiently light and fluffy to be carried through another vacuum tube up and overhead. It rains down into a storage space, ready to be taken to carding. Spilling out of its temporary store, the wool mixture is lifted into the hopper of the carding machine.

From here giant rollers carry it through into the first stage of the carding…

Crofting

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Mike HTA

So what exactly is a croft? And what is crofting?!

Some like to joke that a croft is a piece of land surrounded by red tape and legislation. Which in many ways is true, but for the benefit of today’s blog we’ll define Crofting as a special form of land tenure unique to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Crofting is unique to this part of the world as it evolved from a turbulent period in the areas history, the Highland Clearances, largely as a means of sustaining populations. It is found predominantly in the Western and Northern isles and in the coastal fringes of the western and northern Scottish mainland and is the culmination of many decades of struggle between rich landowners and the poorer local population living and working the land.

While once upon a time crofting was simply the way people lived and worked, deriving their building materials, clothing, food and livelihood from small areas of the land in which their families had lived for generations, today crofting is legally recognised and protected thanks to The Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 which provided for security of tenure, a key issue as most crofters remain tenants, protecting them from being unfairly removed from their land, guaranteeing fair rents and allowing them to claim compensation for improvements should their tenancy come to an end. The law of crofting was codified as the Crofters (Scotland) Act of 1993, but there have been substantial reforms, notably in 2007 and 2010 as part of the Scottish Government’s Land Reform Programme.

So today crofting can be viewed as a legally legitimate social system which is characterised by its common working communities, or “townships”. Individual crofts are typically established on 2 – 5 hectares of land called “in-bye” for better quality forage, arable and vegetable production. Each township manages poorer quality hill ground together, sharing the land to use as common grazing for their area’s cattle and sheep.

Land use in the crofting counties is constrained by climate, soils and topography. Agriculturally, virtually all of the land in the Highlands and Islands is classified as Severely Disadvantaged in terms of Less Favoured Area Directive, yet these areas receive the lowest LFA payments. Most crofters find it impractical to make a living from crofting agriculture alone; thus, most crofters pursue a number of activities to earn their livelihood.

Many crofters are multi- taskers. Livestock kept ranges from Highland cattle, traditional and heritage breed sheep, rare-breed pigs and hens and other fowl. Horticulture is tackled in polytunnels and by traditional lazy and raised beds producing everything from exotic soft fruit to humble root vegetables. Some too are weavers of Harris Tweed, while others work on fishing boats and new areas such us beekeeping and eco-tourism are being explored, all with the aim of working with the land to provide food and a little revenue.

People now regard crofting not merely as a form of land-use but as a way of life which, linked with extraordinarily strong attachment both to family and to place, has helped retain a size of population and a viable and vital rural lifestyle which would otherwise have waned. It is a way of life which keeps people tied to the land in an ecological and respectful way.

As always, crofting is in transition where elements of traditional life sit comfortably alongside modern methods but the ethos remains the same for the people and the land on which they work. At the Harris Tweed Authority we are proud that our work plays a part in protecting one aspect of crofting tradition and life on behalf of our islands, helping to ensure there will always be a cloth to be woven and an income to bring for people who want to live and work here and keep our communities thriving.

While not every crofter is a Harris Tweed weaver and not every Harris Tweed weaver is a crofter there are many who are both, living and working from their homes and crofts, masters of their trades and skilled in a great many things connected with land and life, making a living, quite literally, in one of the most challenging parts of the world.

http://crofting.org