Back				Please note we do NOT sell any finished garments!

The sweater in the picture was actually made for the Prince of Wales and I presented it informally to him during his visit to the Islands in 1999. The Islander is my latest and last design - I haven't had much time to develop more lately - and I am proud of it. My aim was to use the most 'Falkland' of my motifs in one sweater, using a twist pattern between the sections in order to represent our woollen yarn and unite the other patterns into a complete whole. It has been described as a 'historical' sweater, and I like to think (immodestly) that it encompasses the essence of the Islands themselves.

This design as with most of my others is best suited to the simple drop shoulder crew neck style depicted. This particular garment was machine knitted and hand-finished, using our own natural dark brown Yorkshire millspun wool on grey Falkland Mill yarn. As with all my garments it has double welts to match the fairly dense knit fabric. I presented an identical sweater to the Princess Royal during her visit to the Falklands. It is quite possible that neither recipient will ever wear their Islanders but I live in hope. This design also looks good in the dark natural colour on a white background, which is how we will be offering it for sale in due course.

I will explain the pattern bands from the top down.

Stone Runs are a geological phenomenon which no-one has yet explained properly. Like rivers of stone, cascading down the hills in many parts of the Islands - particularly on the East - they are unique to the Falklands. They have to be seen for real to be believed and vary in shape but here's a photo of an 'octopus' (my term) to give you some idea. Seen up close it becomes evident that these aren't just grey all over. In fact I plan on designing an electronic version of my Stone Run design one day - an all over pattern, using marls of white, grey, dark brown with hints of green. Think it could be quite effective.

The sea has always been important here, bringing supplies and new people to the Falklands (though nowadays there's an air link). Most farm settlements are located on the coast and the coastal vessel still plays a vital role in transporting wool away and bringing stores, fuel and timber etc. Shipwrecks occurred quite often in the old days, with some now-famous hulks bearing quiet witness to many a foundered vessel for whom Cape Horn was just too much... Fishing licence revenue is what keeps the Falkland Islands going at present, with wool income having dropped dramatically (though the Islands' economy was founded on wool). Squid jiggers and other types of fishing vessels come here from Japan, Korea, Spain etc to Hoover up the vast stocks and are closely monitored.

Peat is still cut for use as fuel here, though less and less as the years go by and people switch to oil stoves. When cut into sods (big lumps) it is very heavy and very wet. It is thrown out onto the top surface of the ground to dry for several months, which takes ages. In areas where it is slow to dry ie sheltered or very wet ground, it is later rickled - sods are placed on top of each other, staggered, so that the wind can pass through them and speed up drying. The spades used are fairly narrow and have a hole in them to reduce suction when cutting the peat. The peat bank (area where peat is good enough for fuel, it's like baby coal I suppose) is marked out before cutting in yard widths, and is cut a yard deep each time - a good bank might yield two or more depths of cutting. Each yard is marked out again, so a cubic yard is cut into 64 sods. Once it's almost dry - too dry when carted, and it crumbles, leading to waste - the peat is ferried into the settlement with a tractor and trailer, and either thrown into a peat shed (easy option) or stacked very neatly outdoors to keep the weather from penetrating the stack too badly. Sods are split before use, using a small sharp chopper or peat axe - I have a scar on my thumb to show where I broke my own rule and held a sod while splitting it... had gloves on but still made a mess of my thumb. Peat is used in stoves to heat water, warm the house and cook on. There's a special peat cutting machine on East Falkland now, used for several of the main banks there, but here on the West peat-spades are still the order of the day for the few who still use it.  (Most use kerosene or diesel nowadays due to lack of time, since farms were sub-divided.) Cutting  is hard physical work, as wet peat can weigh a ton a cubic yard when wet if it is good solid stuff, which later dries really hard. It has a grain to it which makes splitting it easier - IF you get it right!! Peat was a perk of the job on the big farms before subdivision. It was carted to your stack for you, then you had to throw it back. I do NOT miss carting, throwing back, splitting sods to fill buckets, carrying buckets, stoking the fire, emptying ashes in a howling gale and endlessly cleaning up the dust that resulted from a peat stove. Tradition - wonderful. Hard labour - no thanks.

In the early days the gauchos who came across to work the wild cattle built circular stone corrals to contain them for handling. Several last to this day, and some have been renovated. They have pop holes at their base, presumably for dogs to escape the milling hooves. Sappers Hill corral is in the middle of an Argentine minefield hence the distant picture only! Other legacies of gaucho days include the (often corrupted) Spanish names for the different parts of horse gear (tack),  local styles of gear which is still handmade by a few, and the names for different colours of horses - some eighty I believe.

Hand shears or blades aren't used so much any more - but they are still important tools for eye locking wool blind sheep,  or for shearing the occasional sheep miles from home. Contract shearers come here from New Zealand, Australia and the UK, joining local men in shearing gangs. Although they all use machines now, some of them are also expert blade shearers and we've known one to use hand shears at the end of a run, just for the fun of it. Blade shearing leaves a protective layer of wool on the sheep. Many a pair of rusty old shears can be found lying around shanties and sheds, see photo. I was going to use a modern hand piece to represent shearing, but the blades made a far nicer pattern...

�@

Wool is the primary and now unreliable source of farm income (no real meat trade). We have worked hard to improve our own sheep. My fanciful motif sheep wanders a landscape of diddledee a low-growing heathery shrub bearing tiny red berries which the sheep love. The photo shows The Duck, our best half-bred ram ever, with ribbons for Best Shearling and Champion Ram at the Fox Bay Ram & Fleece Show many  years back. Quite a character - he put himself out with the ewes when he thought it was time to work, and came home when he got bored...

Fences were no obstacle to this big chap.

So that's the Islander sweater. I don't intend making any for sale, am too busy dyeing spinning felting etc etc etc but thought it might be of interest to knitters/designers to see my design ideas and reasons for the motifs.

�@

Last updated 1st August 2006

�@