I hope no one has been trying to get a hold of me lately. I’ve somehow managed to have every line of communication severed over the past two days - my phone has no credit, I can’t find my voltage converter for my laptop, the highschool’s web-blocker is on the fritz and won’t let me check my email or facebook, AND I have 100% lost my voice for the past two days.

SO, because this blog (somehow spared from Websense’s block list) is my only connection to world, I’m going to leave some messages here. See those that apply to you:

Pamela: Please book Orkney for me. If its not raining, I may bike to your place this evening (although I can barely speak and can’t use my laptop).

Family: My throat is sore, but I don’t have a fever, so I’m assuming it isn’t serious. I think its probably a cosmic message to stop talking and do some work.

Everyone else: I won’t have any way to take/edit/upload photos until I find my voltage converter, so its going to be pretty visually dull around here until it turns up. Bear with me.

All else is well - working on exhibition pieces and drinking lots of tea!

I’m back at Ardnamurchan highschool after a two day tour of the Isle of Skye ( An t-Eilean Sgitheanach in Gaelic).

Immediately after getting off the ferry, Pamela and I visited a magical knitwear shop called Ragamuffin . Apparently it was started independently by a student and a knitting machine and has turned into a retail space for the original designer and other smallish scale designers of woolen / linen garments. I did pick up a thing or two - although I didn’t have a spare $400 to drop on a sweater.

The photo above was taken that afternoon after lunch in Portree (the island’s biggest town). Morag Anna, a Raasay native and Gaidhlig Development Officer of the Highland Council spent the afternoon giving me a whirlwind tour of the island. I can’t begin to expain the sceenery - its the kind of thing you have to see to understand. That picture is from the Waternish area - the northern tip of Skye - which was also the location of …

Shilasdair, the Skye yarn company! Here I picked up a big order of their naturally dyed wool yarn - which I’ve spent the better part of today winding from hanks into balls (an arduous process without a ball winder). I got a tour of their dyeing studio and garden, but missed out on a visit with the dyer/designer, who was away on holiday.

The three small balls of yarn are from the shop of a handspinner in Broadford. It felt a bit insulting to be buying Rowan yarn from a handspinner, but she just didn’t seem to have the colours I was looking for. The other cones were donated by a woman in Glenuig who used to sell machine knit sweaters. As it turns out, I’ll only have about a week and a half to actually produce my exhibition pieces with this yarn. I’m already getting flashbacks to knitting furiously at 2AM trying to meet past knitting deadlines - although they’re probably the most pleasant type of deadline to have.

The rest of my time on Skye was spent at Sabhal Mor Ostaig - the Gaighlig university I’ll be spending a year at in September. I got a full tour of the campus, met their artists in residence, met some current students, and had an hour long interview / assessment of my Gaidhlig ability (which went quite well). Now its back to work. Updates on what all of this yarn is to become coming soon.

Students from Acharacle primary school look on as I pour some yellow dye down the sink. The dye was made from bog myrtle - a local plant I found out about just after I got here (’rideag’ in Gaelic). The dyes have been coming out very well and the bog myrtle smells great. Kind of like cloves? Every evening in between workshops I’ve been taking a walk to a bog near my place and picking bog myrtle in the midges (the vicious Scottish equivalent of black flies).

The younger the kids are, they more willing they seem to be to improvize with textiles. Older students want to get the pattern just right and get frustrated when things aren’t perfect the first time, but the younger ones just go for it. Making mittens and bags inevitably turns into making puppets, monsters, and accessories.

Contrary to what I’ve posted here, I’ve actually been quite busy at work at Ardnamurchan highschool. Over the past three weeks, I’ve taught tweleve day long workshops at the highschool and at some of the elementary schools in the area. The idea was to expose the students to traditional and contemporary craft and to integrate the use of Gaidhlig language into the workshops.

We’ve been working on natural dyeing and an intro to sewing. After a review of basic skills and concepts, students were encouraged to experiment in their application using recycled materials. The overall focus of the workshops was to give the students a sense of both freedom to create, basic skills to achieve their visions, and a sense of history and context within traditional and contemporary craft.

Here are some examples of the kind of work the students have been producing (a hand-sewn, felt hat; felt skull patch, felt tie, and felt mits with applique and embroidery; and a mit gone awry and turned into a whale puppet).

More on the workshops coming up next…