A guest blog by my daughter Hilde about knitting her Foula wool dress.Â
Foula Wool was in its start-up year, the first year we stayed on Foula. They had so little wool for the mill to process that the natural colours weren’t processed as separate batches. The result, a set of transition hanks (skeins). These 100 gram bunches were one half fawn, the other light grey with a length of gradient between the two.
I bought all the of the gradient hanks they had, more than a kilo in total, not really knowing hat I would do with it. For two years this special wool was laid aside while I gained more knitting experience and found some inspiration. I then brought it back to Foula in 2015, where I had time to knit with it.
Making my own pattern for the Foula dress
I had decided to make a pinafore I but couldn’t really find a pattern that I liked, so I knitted a swatch,  measured my circumference in several places and did some maths.  Starting at the bottom I knitted it in the round, so it is completely seamless and after a small 2×2 rib the rest of the dress is a plain stockinette stitch throughout, leaving the gradient in the wool as the main feature of the dress. To shape the dress I gradually decreased in front and back to create the effects of figure darts.
This dress is even more a of a one-off than normal hand knits because the wool was a limited edition and I designed it exactly to my size and shape.
Time and cost
The Foula wool dress contains about 450g of wool, which cost about £45 and took approximately 16 hours to complete.