Shetland Wool Week: Day 19: Walls, Bonhoga and Bressay

Thursday 26 Sept

This was an official rest day, but again with an evening event. We started the day by having a lovely drive to Walls, we couldn’t remember visiting there before. 

Walls from the Club car park 

There was a Wool Week event ‘Cafe, Knitwear, Fleeces, Sheep and Ponies’ in the Walls Regatta Club - for the Thursday and Friday. As always there was coffee and cake and  textile related stalls by some local folk and lots of fleece for sale.

Tea and cakes, with some of the knitwear in the background

I resisted the fleece (and this continued for the whole trip!) but did treat the grandchildren to notebooks covered in fabric from Jamieson’s mill. I chose for each to have a Viking on the front! 

We had not visited Bonhoga on this visit so decided to drive back there for lunch and enjoyed this very much. It is a lovely place to have a meal and cabinets with work on display in the cafe. Today much of this was weaving so that was great. 

We did have a rest in the afternoon and an early meal as I was meeting Alison at the Bressay ferry terminal and we were going over to meet Roisin McAtamney and look round her studio. She runs R.A.M knitwear (1) which is machine knit based. Both Alison and I machine knit and are proud of that. It was a blowy and wet evening so we were very pleased to be met at the ferry terminal. It would have been too far to walk to the schoolroom where Roisin is based. We had a great time, including a glass of wine, looking at and discussing her samples and resulting knitwear. 

The tie I bought for M

We were both really pleased to have visited Roisin, although both of us seemed exhausted already by the week and it’s great activities. 

M met me at the quay, we had supper and tumbled into bed. Tomorrow I would have nothing in the evening. What a great week this had turned into. 

1. Roisin, works at the Shetland College as the Textile Technician. She is responsible for programming and running the electronic knitting machines and finishing equipment for both students and local businesses that use these facilities. Her knitwear can be found at R.A.M Knitwear, and you can find out more about the wonderful things she knits on facebook.