Gorse flower, lavish, heather orchid…. They sound like names of luxury shower gels or racehorses. In fact, they’re the names given to the vivid wool colours that textiles designer Emily Shaw is playing with to recreate Tresco’s wild gorse - and heather-clad northern tip.
She shows me postage-stamp-sized wool samples lined up on a page in the precious black sketchbook where she plots her ideas for new fabrics. Soft pinks sit alongside maroons and yellows, and a steely silver representing Tresco’s granite walls and Cromwell’s castle. Below the colour swatches are Emily’s pencil markings calculating the maths of it all. The page is so pretty it’s a work of art in itself.
“Just as photographers see views as photographs, I see them as fabrics,” says Emily, in her thirties. “I try to translate the colours that I see in the landscape into a woven textile. It can be a challenge but when it works it’s one of the most satisfying feelings there is. The feeling of unwinding the finished fabric off the loom is unbeatable.”
Pop to Emily’s workshop, opposite Porthmellon beach on St. Mary’s, and you can see for yourself the results of her creative scribblings – beautiful woven items in her Tresco Heather collection which range from glasses cases to cushions and bags. “Pinks were a new departure for me,” she says. “But people love them.”
Her signature collection is her Atlantic range, using rich turquoises and bold blues mirroring the seas around her. “My favourite wool colours are azure and another that’s called Atlantic spray, which I think were made for Scilly,” smiles Emily. (Look out too for coral, representing the buoys, which she weaves in as streaks). “I just love the names. There’s even a greenish one called Zomp, that I want an excuse to use!” She makes a Lichen collection too, combining mustards and granite silvers, and another called Regatta, using yacht sails as a motif. The latter sells well in the summer when the yachties arrive, she says.
The art of translating landscapes into textiles is something Emily learned on a visit to the Isle of Harris, famous for its tweed, while studying for a degree in textiles at Manchester School of Art. “I only had to look at the mountains, sandy shores and seaweeds to see where their tweeds got their colours from.” Those tweeds inspired Emily’s final university project, using her own fabric - a man’s jacket that she gave to her twin brother Joe.
Brought up in a family of creatives (her father is a fine artist, her mother studied graphic design) Emily always knew she’d be one too. Right up until the end of her first year at university she thought she would work in print design, but once she realised the extent to which woven textiles could also involve colour, pattern and design, and “looked cool”, she switched to crafting them. She loved using natural materials, especially lambswool, which is what she weaves today, sourced mainly from a mill in Aberdeenshire.
“Handweaving is a traditional skill that’s on its way out,” says Emily. “So, when I left university, I felt I couldn’t not carry on doing it. I wanted to follow an old tradition and give it a contemporary style. But it’s very labour intensive, and the raw materials are expensive, so it’s not surprising that few people are weaving commercially today.”
With a first-class degree under her belt Emily started selling her textiles at markets across the UK. But she says she would probably not be where she is today were it not for the help of the Prince’s Trust which provided her with a mentor who gave her business coaching. “That was just before Covid,” she says. “I then spent the first months of lockdown weaving textiles at home in Loughborough. I had plenty of time to explore and experiment so it was a very happy time for me.”
Then, in the summer of 2020, her partner was offered a teaching job on Scilly – which neither he or Emily had ever previously visited – so the couple took the plunge (Emily without even seeing the islands) and moved to St. Mary’s. The following year Emily and her loom moved into the top floor of Phoenix Craft Studios, where she wove and sold her textiles. “People love watching how I work. I encourage them to touch the yarns and textiles as it’s such a nice tactile experience,” she says.
She also sells at Tresco Makers’ Market, where she enjoys the interaction with visitors. “I adore chatting,” she says. “People often don’t realise that I make my fabrics by hand.” The monthly market is held along the quay wall, so unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s her Atlantic collection that sells best.
Emily admits that getting the balance between creative expression and business can be tricky. “For me, making textiles is a business so I have to sell them. I aim to make ‘practical pieces of art’, that can be used and that will last a long time. I have a purse that I made just after leaving art college and it’s still in great ‘nick’.”
But weaving also feels creative and therapeutic, she says. “Time flies when I’m at the loom. It’s rhythmical, like a meditation. I use both my hands and feet, so it’s like a mini workout. You have to concentrate one hundred per cent and think about nothing else. You feel great when the work is done.”
I ask about her business name – Emily Mary. Why not Emily Shaw? She smiles. “It’s simple. At university there was another Emily Shaw, so one of us had to change their name. I used my middle name Mary, and I’ve stuck with it ever since.”
Image credit: adjbrown.com
