Douglas Stewart

And I was a printer.

I was a weaver.

And then ultimately I did my rotation into knitting, which sounds like a very sort of crafty thing where you sit with needles.

But in fact, it's a very industrial course.

You do all your knitting on these huge screaming knitting machines that are often computer operated.

And I found knitting just to be really inspiring.

It was...

You know, you made this cloth, anything you could imagine in 3D you could make.

And we made really diverse things.

We made fashion, we made clothing, we made interiors.

But we also made things like car interiors or automobile interiors.

And we made sacks and vessels for inside the body with sort of microscopic knitting machines.

And so it was a wonderful education.

But my whole life, I felt like a writer that couldn't be a writer.

Yeah, you're right.

Everything at this time moves to the Far East and nothing is made in the West and textiles as an industry is on its knees.

But there's a wonderful tradition on the Outer Hebrides of making something called Harris Tweed.

And it was established as a sort of almost a socialist project, I would say, where each of the homes would have a loom behind the house in a shed.

And when the crofters, when the islanders couldn't rely on the sea or the land to support themselves, they would be able to make some cloth.

You know, it is still made in that exact same way, even today.