My Weekend with Alice Starmore

Britain in the seventies may have been a tumultuous time politically and economically, but up in a quiet northwest corner of Scotland, on the Isle of Lewis, artist Alice Starmore was beginning her storied design career. Fifty years later, she is still there. The author of numerous knitting design and instruction books, Starmore is perhaps best known for her intricate colorwork knitting designs, inspired by the rugged land- and seascapes that surround her. She grew up in a traditional Gaelic-speaking Hebridean household, where crofting, raising sheep, spinning, dyeing, and knitting were necessities, not hobbies. Starmore’s forefathers were fishermen, and generations of women in the family knit the woolen “fisher gansies” that protected the seafarers from the harsh weather conditions of the north Atlantic Ocean.

The Lewis moorland in winter sunshine.

Starmore shares on her personal website, AliceStarmore.com: “From my grandparents’ and my parents’ generations I learned about crofting, cutting peat for fuel, and which plants to use for medicinal and dyeing purposes. From my aunts I learned how to make fisher gansies. But my mother was the biggest influence on my early creativity—she taught me to knit and to sew at a very early age and she had a keen eye for fashion. I learned how to drape fabric and how to tailor a fine coat, but above all she passed on to me her enthusiasm and her imaginative approach to everything she made. My first commercial knitting collection, which I produced in 1975, is very strongly based on techniques that I learned from my mother; its colours and patterns were based on the shoreline of the Eye Peninsula, where I lived at the time.”

The Polaris cardigan, Briodag Hat Set and Sulaire shawl patterncard kit designs by Alice Starmore for Virtual Yarns, worn with the Persian Tiles wrap from the book A Collector's Item. Modelled by Iona Mairead Davidson.

Both an artist and naturalist at heart, it was childhood summers spent on the Lewis moor that first inspired her passion for the geology, plant matter, and sea life which still provide Starmore with the unending source of visual