IT’S renowned for the intricate patterns of the knitwear crafted by its womenfolk but the unique way of making chairs developed by the men of Fair Isle is in danger of dying out.
While they are similar to the celebrated strawbacked chairs of Orkney, the technique the Fair Isle men adopted was not traditionally used elsewhere in Britain, or northern Europe.
It has now been listed on the Heritage Crafts Association’s Red List of Critically Endangered Crafts and is being taught to school children to help preserve it and make it more widely known.
Until recently only one man, Stewart Thomson, was making the chairs but he has passed on his skills to another Fair Isle native, Eve Eunson, who has designed an activity guide for pupils to teach them the technique. The guide has been piloted successfully and is part of a campaign to introduce craft and making skills into Scotland’s curriculum.
Launched by Craft Scotland and MAKE Learn, it follows a report highlighting the benefits of teaching craft which include the protection of Scotland’s unique craft heritage.
The Craft and Making Education in Scotland Today report calls for better resources for teaching craft in classrooms and a national strategy for material skills development in schools in order to sustain and
grow Scotland’s workforce for an industry that currently contributes more than £70m to the Scottish economy.
As part of the campaign, a number of craft workers were recruited to pass on their skills by designing activity guides for primary school pupils.
Eunson’s “knotted baskets” guide teaches them how to make a basket of rope using the same technique the men of Fair Isle used for generations to make strawback chairs.
She said she hoped it would raise the profile of the craft, as well as teach the children transferable skills such as planning, designing and how to use by-products to make beautiful and useful items.
Eunson, who was born and brought up on her family’s croft on Fair Isle, trained as an architect but despite having no previous woodworking experience and little knowledge of vernacular furniture decided to conduct an ambitious research project to trace, survey and recreate the traditional chairs of her native isle.
In doing so she discovered the knotted straw working technique was completely different from the stitching technique used in other strawback chairs. Her findings led the method to be officially registered as endangered.
“It’s quite interesting that it ended up as the basketry technique of choice for the Fair Isle men – although Fair Isle may seem incredibly isolated to some people’s minds, the opportunity for influence from across the globe, via the sea, was vast,” she pointed out. “Shipwrecks were common and provided a lot of opportunity for crafts and technologies from other seafaring countries to make their way to Fair Isle. Some people like to attribute the Fair Isle knitting patterns to the Spanish Armada galleon wreck – it’s fun to play with the concept that the knotting technique could have come from there too.”
While knitting was traditionally considered women’s work, woodworking and chairmaking were usually men’s activities.
“You get a lot of chat about the creativity of Shetland and Fair Isle women and their lovely knitwear, but not an awful lot of talk about what the men were doing – yet in the winter, if they were not out fishing, they were turning their hand to some amazing stuff,” said Eunson. “The Fair Isle chairs were particularly nice and they put in a high level of detail.”
Eunson hopes raising the profile of the tradition will create a market for the chairs and that chair-making, much like the famous knitwear, could make a decent contribution to the economy of Fair Isle’s population, which is now fewer than 50 people.
CATRIONA Duffy, co-founder of MAKE Learn, said that although traditional crafts in Scotland are internationally celebrated their future is not assured.
“Recent research published by the Heritage Crafts Association highlights that Scotland’s material heritage is critically endangered,” Duffy said.
“Passing on traditional skills preserves material heritage and reflects locally available resources, telling unique stories about people and place. It is through this ‘passing on’ that traditional crafts open up routes into learning about culture, identity and the fundamentals of sustainable thinking.
“Crucially, learning how to make through traditional crafts also builds confidence and develops motor skills, problem-solving skills and other essential transferable life skills.”
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