Weaving & Writing

Last Updated on 30 March 2011 Written by Administrator

Five years ago I was living in Newport Beach in California. If you had told me five years ago that I would have moved back to the Isle of Lewis, bought a textile company and learnt how to weave, I would have called you a taxi. But it just shows how right John Lennon was when he said that "life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."

I grew up watching my father weave, he has done it since he was a young lad. I did odd jobs around the loomshed while he worked, filling pirns and beaming tweeds. I was interested in other things though, I left the island and worked in the media after University - as writer and director. I also ran a television production company (named after my father’s nickname ‘Zebo’.)

I always had an interest in business as well as the arts and a few years ago, I found out about a weaver on the island who was retiring and putting his business up for sale. He didn’t weave Harris Tweed, his cloth was called ‘Breanish Tweed’, a husband and wife team who had been working hard at it for thirty years. 

The more I learnt, the more amazed I was at what this man had done. Iain, the weaver, had built up a jem of a business, selling his unique lightweight cloth to the best tailors and fashion houses in the world - Savile Row, Vivienne Westwood, Oxxford Clothing in Chicago. The list went on, and it was an impressive one. The business was about to disappear because nobody wanted to take it on. It had been on the market for a few years. 

I had been looking for a business to put my energies into for a while and, quite naively, bought it. Extremely. Naively. My father taught me how to weave and I would fit it in, in the evenings around my writing. My mother was a textile designer and she taught my sister and I that side of the business. My father went round the village looking for old looms that nobody wanted, most of the old single width looms had been thrown in the dump long ago. We rescued a couple, got a couple more for spares. We took on another weaver, a young woman called Karin Slater. She is still the youngest weaver on the island as well as a fine poet. 

I then hit the road to try and get some of these customers back. The business had been wound down to nothing. On top of the technical challenges of creating the cloth, there was my own inexperience in the trade, the daunting challenge of visiting companies at the very top of the game. 

I visited London a lot. Then Vienna. We got a new agent in the US. Gradually our customers came back and new ones bought cloth from us. Our best market now is Japan, closely followed by Germany. Textiles is a lot like the arts, the learning is a constant. It is an exciting world, the bespoke tailors are so skilled, the fashion houses so creative - there is an incredible energy to this machine.

I learnt a lot - one of the most interesting aspect is how trends are decided. We are working at the moment on patterns and colours which will be in the shops in Autumn/Winter 2012. If anyone is interested in how this happens, I can write something on our Facebook page if you get in touch - www.facebook.com/Breanish.

We are now giving work to five weavers in the village and best of all, the people that my parents taught are not teaching other people. We will soon be the last people to weave in this traditional way, using this old loom. And once a tradition goes, which it can do very quickly, it is almost impossible to relearn it. So it makes me very happy when I walk through the village and hear the old looms going.

It can sometimes be hard to find time to combine writing and business, but I have finally accepted that this is how my life is and that I'd better just get on with it. The two lives are fairly separate, although I'm starting to find that looms are sneaking into my plays in the most unexpected places.

END.

Parameters (Article)

Author	Administratorjezwebb
Author Alias
Access Level	PublicRegisteredSpecial
Created Date
Start Publishing
Finish Publishing

Parameters (Advanced)

Show Title	Use GlobalNoYes
Title Linkable	Use GlobalNoYes
Intro Text	Use GlobalHideShow
Section Name	Use GlobalHideShow
Section Title Linkable	Use GlobalNoYes
Category Title	Use GlobalHideShow
Category Title Linkable	Use GlobalNoYes
Article Rating	Use GlobalHideShow
Author Name	Use GlobalHideShow
Created Date and Time	Use GlobalHideShow
Modified Date and Time	Use GlobalHideShow
PDF Icon	Use GlobalHideShow
Print Icon	Use GlobalHideShow
E-mail Icon	Use GlobalHideShow
Content Language	- Select Language -English (United Kingdom)
Key Reference
Alternative Read more: text

Metadata Information

Description