SOK’s Mission
Fair Isle, Shetland Lace (Openwark), and domestic machine knitting have shaped our community for hundreds of years. These skills are living heritage crafts, meaning that they are crafts that have been developed in Shetland over hundreds of years and continue to be practiced today. Beyond the skills themselves, Shetland’s living knitting heritage has influenced the economy and society of Shetland; the art, music, and written work produced in the area; and even how Shetlanders think and interact.
In the past, the industry was structured in a way that kept most of our knitters unknown outside of Shetland. For nearly 100 years, this has meant that the story of our living heritage skills have been told by those from outside of Shetland who do not fully understand the skills involved or how the knitting industry has shaped and influenced the culture of Shetland.
SOK’s mission is to preserve and protect Shetland’s living knitting heritage and is mainly focused on providing resources and services to the local community, though in doing so, we also engage with outreach and services beyond our shores. To do this, our aims for the next five years are:
-
-
- To interview members of the community who were part of the pre-1970 knitting industry to record their stories and techniques so that both are preserved for Shetland and the world;
- To create local gatherings specifically for adults that are designed specifically for conveying local skills and techniques orally to preserve the Shetland way of thinking about knitting;
- To train provide training for local knitters to take up roles that align with modern demand, primarily as tutors, speakers, authors, and designers, while also providing support for people to enter supporting roles such as test knitters, tech editors, etc.;
- To encourage young adults to take up our heritage knitting crafts in more significant numbers to ensure that Shetland continues to benefit from the shared culture and financial benefits of the crafts that were developed and refined by the minds of those who came before us.
- To offer an ‘institutional voice’ that is harder to dismiss than an individual voice in matters relating to misinformation, appropriation, and misexploitation
-
To meet these aims, we are applying for funding to cover the costs of an oral history project that will allow us to interview senior knitters in their own homes and, when possible, film them at their wires. We are planning a series of online knitting events and smaller in-person events at multiple times of the year to position Shetland’s knitters as the experts of their own craft and create more opportunities for tutors and speakers to earn from our living heritage crafts. We will also host regular events just for local people that will be designed for those who want to learn Shetland’s heritage knitting skills the “proper” way, as well as events that are more casual to appeal to a wider range of local knitters. Additionally, we are seeking funding to create learning modules to provide training for local knitters who want to transition to roles as tutors, designers, and speakers who want structured, practical support.
How SOK Fits
The ShetlandPeerieMakkers have done a wonderful job passing on Fair Isle and Openward skills in the primary schools. Young people now have access to the basics, even if their parents are part of the generation who didn’t learn to knit at home or school themselves. However, there is a generation who did not learn these skills and many are now feeling the loss. Also, the Peerie Makkers do not provide a supported path toward a professional role in the modern knitting economy.
Our programs are designed to meet the needs of those who missed the opportunity to learn knitting while young, and who now express that they feel intimidated to start. We also hope to be a next step for young adults who are moving on from the ShetlandPeerieMakkers.
Shetland Wool Week is a well-established institution in Shetland, and SOK wants to ensure that it stays robust. However, many of the knitting classes, including some about our living heritage crafts, are taught by people from outside of Shetland who have no cultural ties to the crafts. Many of the current teachers are very near, or already past, retirement. Some feel obligated to teach to keep the event progressing, but have family and career demands that make it difficult to be involved to the extent that they need to be. Recruitment can be difficult for filling tutor positions, because heading a classroom of strangers can be intimidating. Our work will increase the number of available teachers by providing training and practice for those who want to take on these roles, and create space to test and refine new class ideas ahead of the event.
We are not a museum, and we all respect and benefit from the work already done by the Shetland Textile Museum and the Shetland Museum and Archives. Our hope is that some of our efforts will provide additional context and supplementary material for the collections that already exist in those spaces.
Our ultimate hope is to keep Fair Isle, Openwark and machine knitting living heritage crafts. To do so, we need clear messaging about the crafts on the world stage, increased economic incentives to keep the skills in practice, and a more robust path to transfer the skills to the rising generations of adults. Those are the areas in which SOK plans to serve.