Keeping knitting alive

Herring Girl Knitwear, a clothing company on the Isle of Barra, is keeping alive patterns and styles used during the 19th century. The social enterprise is knitting clothes from patterns used by the ‘herring girls’, the women who followed the herring boats around the UK coast to gut and cure the fish for merchants. Each of the company’s knitters chooses the name and registration number of a fishing boat that is linked historically to their community and uses it to identify their work. herringgirlcollection.com