Shetland Wool Week continues with Jaime's Sheep Heid

It's Shetland Wool Week right now in Shetland and we are celebrating here at Fancy Tiger Crafts! When we were in Shetland this summer, I knew one thing: I had to buy all the colors of Shetland wool and then knit with them. Thank goodness, Scottish designer Kate Davies already had this idea and made an awesome hat pattern called Sheep Heid that does just this. 

Shetland sheep come in 11 recognized colors and their wool is sorted by color and then milled into 9 different colors of naturally colored, un-dyed yarn. The colors range from white to black with shades of browns and grays in between. Kate Davies uses all 9 natural colors of Shetland yarn in her Sheep Heid pattern, which I knit on the plane ride back to the states. This hat is a fair isle pattern that features sheep across the brim and rams on the crown - brilliant. 

photo by Jess Eaton and Jesse Dawson of  www.jldawson.com

I purchased all the yarn at the Jamieson + Smith store in Lerwick, Shetland while visiting. I started knitting my hat right away, casting on somewhere in Skye, knitting straight through the 20 hours of travel time and two plane rides it took to get home. It was a bit cumbersome to bring a small hat project that required 9 balls of yarn onto a plane, but I managed.

This is what my face looks like when I get to buy all the colors of Shetland wool!

I finished my hat within a week of being back in the states - what a fantastic souvenir of our wool-filled travels to Scotland!

In case you can't make the trek to Shetland, we fell so in love with this yarn that we are now carrying it here at Fancy Tiger Crafts.

The fair-isle pattern of this hat was pretty slow going for me, but I am getting so much better at colorwork! The hat ended up being a bit big so I took Kate Davies' advice and lightly fulled it. Magic!! The yarn bloomed, the stitches settled in and my hat looks fantastic after some light agitation in hot water.

The design of this hat is superb - it captures the beauty of the natural colors of Shetland wool in a way that also acknowledges the traditional fair isle designs of the island. Also...SHEEP!