Knitting Folk Music and Fair Trade

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by Lynn Gray Ross
August 2009

I wrote earlier in the year about the Blue Bunnit as a symbol of Scottish culture, mentioning the Whistlebinkie folk group and Mick Broderick.

As promised Eddie McGuire from Whistlebinkie sent me this photo from one of their album covers where Mick is wearing the bunnit I designed for him when the group went on tour in China. Mick died in Glasgow the same weekend Eddie sent the photo. The bunnit had a mention in his obituary in The Herald. The connection carries on.

I met Heather MacLeod on the ferry the other day, one of the spinners who helped produce a gaggle of bunnits for the next tour so he could keep his own and give the rest as appropriate diplomatic gifts, instead of fastening the original to his hair.

Heather & I mourned for lost friends and times past & laughed as we remembered the 70’s on the island when folk music was in revival and groups like the Whistlebinkie played regularly in the village halls.

Thankfully the Folk Festival on Arran started again this year bringing artists to the island and spotlighting local talent, an unwitting tribute to Mick as one of “auld yins.”

Producing the bunnits used to leave our hands & fingernails blue for days from the natural indigo dye, but it didn’t stop us from playing music or dancing.

According to African dye traditions, this meant that the indigo was authentic and not synthetic, otherwise no blue hands. Their tradition also says that indigo is a gift from the blue sky.

This month the blue “Scotland Meets Uruguay” bunnit is featured at the Burnside Gallery in Brodick. Artesano yarn samples from Uruguay are on display alongside the Arran Fairtrade promotion, showing that you can buy sustainably on the island.

Meanwhile we’ve added the bunnit pattern in Manos del Uruguay Handspun to our traditional collection to promote Artesano Yarns and the Women’s Co-operative in Uruguay who spin the wool.
Folk music, instruments and costumes give our local culture their own unique identity.  This is as true in Scotland as in Latin America.

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