BEFORE long, the meadowsweet will be blooming on the shores of Loch Dunvegan and Eva Lambert will be down there gathering it in. Boiling up not only flowers and leaves, she will make with it the first of the summer season’s yellow dyes.

Later, she will move onto the bright yellow umbels of tansy, and later still the heather will bloom, and she will gather on the hills for her dye pots. Some years she may use gorse flowers, which produce a lovely yellow colour, ‘but they’re prickly, so that’s not so much fun’, she says.

Eva Lambert

These flowers are just some of the natural materials Eva uses to create the Shilasdair wools, a range renowned for their high quality and gorgeous colours which are evocative of their origins in Waternish on the west coast of Skye and the landscape that inspires them: the deep blue of a winter loch, greens of the braes, the shades of autumn heather and tones of misty mornings. Shilasdair itself is the Gaelic name of the yellow flag iris, a traditional dye plant to give yellow and black.

There is an exotic quality to the Shilasdair yarns that comes from their intriguing mixture of west coast softness with middle eastern vibrancy. As well as heather and meadowsweet, Eva uses cochineal and lac to make reds and a range of indigos for blues and greens. Both her use of these materials and some of her wool garment designs reflect her own experiences in countries like Turkey and Morocco.

Born in Germany, at the onset of the second world war she moved with her parents to the United States, aged four. Her voice still retains the twang of her American upbringing, even though she has since become a British citizen. Only the second incomers to Waternish, where she and her husband Tony have spent the past 40 years, she jokes that she was sold the ruined croft house where they live because of her accent. ‘They must have thought I had money, though they were wrong!’

In the 1960s she spent four years in Turkey, and it was here that her passion for wool emerged. ‘I fell in love with the carpets,’ she says. ‘I found it very exciting looking at the different designs created by the tribal peoples.’ Picking up skills in rug-making passed down generations, she learned to weave and spin.

She brought these skills to Britain. After a spell in Devon, she moved to Scotland. ‘I had been at Edinburgh University, so I knew I loved the west coast,’ she said.

For years, with four children, she wove on a loom built from a beam of the old croft house. ‘It’s really simple,’ she says. ‘Just two beams down, what else do you need? Some wool, and the rug unfolds.’ She kept sheep and would spin and dye some of her own wool to incorporate into her weaving. Later she deepened her knowledge of the world’s traditional methods for dyeing and weaving, with a six month research trip to Morocco, Algeria, Mali and Niger.

She spins with a drop spindle, as she learned in Turkey, and is a great advocate of it. ‘I don’t like a wheel. You have to sit there and pump, but with a spindle you can do it anywhere, walking around, in the car. It’s faster than the wheel, by the week.’

The dyeing process

Dyeing began with small experiments, and then became a business, which is still expanding. She describes the process as ‘making soup from leftovers’, because the dye used for one colour isn’t thrown away, but is blended to make other colours. ‘When you’re mixing ingredients, you can’t control it, but I think that’s good. There’s that spirit of excitement to it.’ While accepting that ‘it is magic, really’, she is also very down-to-earth about the process, adamant that ‘anyone can learn it at home – it’s just like cooking.’

Now, with the help of Tony, the dyeing process at Shilasdair is becoming partly mechanised to enable them to meet big orders from wool retailers, with more consistency of colour. Yet the process is still basically quite simple and uses only natural ingredients.

Eva says that her use of only natural dye stuffs is not due to any particular environmental commitment. ‘It’s an aesthetic choice. Natural colours are so much more alive. If you magnify a chemical red you get lots of little red dots of colour, but if you magnify cochineal red you see tiny flecks of yellow and blue. This is why chemical dyes look flat but natural colours have depth.’

She is also committed to natural fibres, for similar reasons. ‘I don’t use any nylon ever,’ she says, shuddering at the way polyester is mixed in with silk or angora in some commercial wools, to save money. She uses a lot of merino wool and last year bought up most of the UK crop. She also dyes a double-knit wool which is a gorgeously soft blend of cashmere, merino and angora, each of which take up the dye in subtly different ways, increasing the richness of the colour. Other yarns in the range include silk, cotton dyed with indigo, and for a really exotic feel, there is a spectrum of baby camel hair, which is the softest wool imaginable.

For years, Eva’s colourful rugs were displayed in shops and exhibitions, and her knitting designs are still available in the shop she set up, but has since sold on, in Waternish. She is happy to share her knowledge, and has co-authored a book with Tracy Kendall (The Complete Guide to Natural Dyeing, Search Press) in which she includes some of her recipes. ‘Some people have said to me, oh you’re not going to give away the recipes are you? Well, yes I am.’

She has taught classes and workshops but now gives the impression of no longer needing to prove anything or to pander to anyone’s desires except her own. However, she will continue sharing her experience. ‘I want to do some writing,’ she says. ‘And travel again!’

Iran beckons, as she is curious to learn about the ancient weaving traditions of its tribal people.  Meanwhile, there’s meadowsweet to gather along the shore at Waternish.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• Shilasdair