This Golden Fleece

    "I decide to unpick Britain's woolly story. This will be my new year's quest [...] I will leave my office job to knit my way across the British Isles. Wool will be my compass and my guidebook - to Fair Isle, Yorkshire, the Cotswolds, and beyond - as I work my way from north to south and east to west. I will write about the wool I find and what I knit with it: why we do it, how we do it, who has done it.

    Knitting will shape my journey through the coming year."

    In This Golden Fleece, Esther Rutter has written a delightful, informative account of her year of discovery. She is an engaging guide who writes beautifully and expressively, taking the reader on journeys across these islands and letting them share in her making as she chooses a dozen projects and wools with local/historical significance and works her way through them, uncovering their origins as she does so. 

    Tackling everything from a stout gansey to a fine baby shawl, joining a dyeing workshop and making yarn from a raw fleece, visiting skilled practitioners of today and exploring the extraordinary industry of knitters of the past, Esther collects stories: "of women, knitters, farmers, spinners. Tales of fisher lassies and cap makers, designers and artists, nuns and mechanics. Knitting's history is everywhere, in mountain landscapes and industrial estates, sprawling cities and tiny villages. It is an old craft - and a new one, its banner raised by legions of knitters and designers for whom it is more than 'just a hobby'. For many knitters, this craft has self-defining, life-affirming power."

  While books of this kind can suffer from a self-indulgent over-exposure on the writer's part, Esther's personal tread is light, and the happy balance she has struck between observation and research makes This Golden Fleece a great pleasure to read. Whether you are a knitter yourself, interested in social history, enjoy travel writing with a particular focus, or want to know more about Britain's sheep and the qualities and uses of their wool, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

 

(By the way, Ramsey, my Crando Woodworks Manx Loaghtan sheep, came from Eden Cottage Yarns; he and the book are sitting on a Vedbaek shawl.)

 

Edited to add: there's a short extract from the book here.

Comments

[Simon T (StuckinaBook)]

I'm so glad you liked it as much as I thought you would! I read it as a total non-expert and loved it too.

[Cornflower]

Thanks, Simon. I think it deserves a really wide readership!

[Toffeeapple]

This looks so promising and exciting.