Gudrun Johnston, The Shetland Trader

About this episode

Gudrun Johnston discusses her journey in Shetland knitting and the impact of her family's legacy on her design style.

Gudrun Johnston has a deep legacy in Shetland knitting: her father’s family comes from the islands, and her mother founded a knitwear company that blended contemporary silhouettes with Fair Isle motifs, a business she called the Shetland Trader. But although Gudrun grew up wearing her mother’s designs, she didn’t learn to knit from her. Growing up largely elsewhere in Scotland, she learned the craft as a child, but it didn’t become central to her life for decades. She eventually fell in love with knitting, thousands of miles from Shetland. In 2007, she published her first design, a skirt in a hemp-blend yarn for her daughter. From that point, knitting and Shetland drew her back more and more. Developing her own design style, she incorporated stitches and motifs from traditional knitting and found a deep affinity with yarn milled locally from the traditional dual-coated sheep. As generations of local knitters did before her, she draws on elements from elsewhere but gives them a distinctly Shetland flair. Although knitters worldwide know about haps and Fair Isle knitting today, the island’s knitting tradition has faced economic threats over the years. Many knitters practiced the…

People in this episode

Guest: Gudrun Johnston

Topics covered

• Shetland knitting
• knitwear design
• cottage industry
• traditional crafts
• Fair Isle motifs

Keywords

• Shetland knitting
• Gudrun Johnston
• knitwear
• Fair Isle
• traditional knitting
• Shetland Trader
• craft
• design

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Shetland Trader, Shetland Wool Week, Shetland Organisation of Knitters

Places: Shetland, Scotland

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