By Ines Keane
Fair Isle is a speck of land halfway between Orkney and Shetland, and the knitting named after it has a better-documented history than its legends suggest.
Wikipedia places the island at the approximate midpoint between the southern tip of Shetland’s Mainland and North Ronaldsay, the northernmost of the Orkney Islands. It covers 768 hectares, about 4.8 kilometres long and 2.4 wide. The population was 69 in 2001 and 44 permanent residents at the 2022 census, and the island has been owned by the National Trust for Scotland since 1954. The article says passenger service is provided by the vessel Good Shepherd IV or by a nine-seat aeroplane from Tingwall Airport. Check current timetables before you plan.
Counting colours
The Wikipedia article on the knitting says traditional Fair Isle patterns use a limited palette of about five colours, only two colours per row, are worked in the round, and limit how long any one colour runs. It names common motifs such as OXO shapes and peeries, simplified geometric forms. The unused yarn is carried, stranded, across the back of the work, usually over three to five stitches to avoid loose loops. Steeks are worked across the armhole openings so the body can be knitted in the round and cut afterwards, and the word comes from the Scottish Gaelic for stitch and to close shut. The V&A describes the bands of horizontal motifs, with crosses, diamonds and eight-pointed stars.
How old is the pattern?
Here the sources disagree. The V&A’s article says the patterns are said by legend to come from survivors of the Spanish Armada in 1588, though Scandinavian influence also seems likely. A 2004 paper by Deborah Pulliam for the Textile Society of America takes the Armada story apart. It says the Spanish ship El Gran Grifon, wrecked in 1588, is credited with teaching islanders multicoloured knitting, and that there appears to have been no multicoloured knitting tradition in sixteenth-century Spain. The paper says the oldest confirmed Fair Isle pieces are caps from the 1850s and 1860s in museum collections, and that what is called Fair Isle knitting today dates no earlier than the mid-nineteenth century, even on Fair Isle itself. It proposes a Baltic source instead, pointing to mittens and socks from sixteenth-century Riga with multicoloured geometric patterns.
We have not read the museum catalogues behind the paper. It is one author’s argument, and the V&A calls the Armada story a legend. We are not choosing.
The jumper
Wikipedia says Fair Isle knitting gained popularity when the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, wore Fair Isle jumpers in public in 1921. The V&A says the first Fair Isle sweaters were not produced until the First World War, and that in the 1920s the Prince of Wales wore one while golfing, which spurred fashion demand. It adds that the American designer Ralph Lauren included Fair Isle in his first collection in the early 1980s. So the sweater is younger than the pattern’s legends, and the sources do not fix the date more precisely.
Beyond Fair Isle
The V&A article places the knitting in a wider Shetland trade. It says Shetlanders were trading hosiery with Dutch and German merchants by the early 1700s and that by 1901 about two-thirds of Shetlanders were involved in the hosiery trade. It also says Shetland lace knitting started in the 1840s and describes the shawls that begin from a single stitch, and says knitters earned little despite thousands of stitches per garment. Those are the V&A’s statements and we have not checked them against Shetland sources. Wikipedia’s article on the island adds that knitting is an important source of income for the island’s women. It does not give a date or a figure.
A word on bird watchers
The same island article says a permanent bird observatory was founded by George Waterston in 1948, and that a 2010 building was destroyed by fire on 10 March 2019. We found no current source on visitor numbers or accommodation, so check directly before you plan a trip.
What we could not find
We could not find a source on how many knitters work on Fair Isle today, whether any cooperative sells locally, or how to tell hand-knitted work on the island from a machine copy. We are not naming a knitter. A name given to you should come with a way to confirm that the piece was knitted on Fair Isle and not elsewhere in Shetland or beyond.
What to ask
Ask who knitted it and where. Ask whether it is hand-knitted or machine-made. Ask what the wool is and where it was spun. Ask whether the pattern is traditional or a modern variation, and how many colours it uses. Ask how to wash it, since our sources do not say.
We are not naming a workshop. We have not sourced one for this piece.
Roam first. Shop later.
Fair Isle makers can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/