The Cabrach Tweed Project

To honour the people of the Cabrach and to celebrate the landscape and heritage of this outstanding place, the Trust have developed a new Cabrach Tweed in collaboration with the Cabrach community. This project was a partnership between the Trust and the Social Enterprise Academy via their Steps to Sustainability programme. This National Lottery Heritage Fund programme was delivered across a 15-month period, with a focus on supporting heritage organisations to build stronger partnerships and become more financially sustainable.

This project intends to have a lasting impact on the community, bringing to bear a modern addition to the Cabrach’s rich identity. Resultant Cabrach Tweed products will be ‘exclusive’, providing an enhanced sense of pride and place. Special thanks to our community team for their time and energy, Johnstons of Elgin for their early design support and encouragement, and Woven in the Bone and MacNaughton’s Isla Bank Mill for bringing our design to life.

The workshops delivered as part of this project were as follows:
Workshop 1 – Discovering the Cabrach landscape

Participants considered colours, textures and pattern, and their proportions within the Cabrach landscape, looking up close as well as into the distance. On returning to the workshop base (for a cup of tea), images were reviewed and images printed in colour in preparation for the next workshop.

Workshop 2 – Preparing papers and collaging the landscape

Participants painted a range of papers matching the colour and texture in their photographs to create their individual colour palette, recording as we went along to inform the dye process, mimicking the way that ‘true’ tweed is made, where the yarn is constructed from blended dyed fibres (fleece) prior to spinning.

In the afternoon participants constructed collage/s based on their photographic image/s. By cutting and tearing papers, using eye only (no tracing or drawing) and considering colour, texture and proportion, the image were simplified whilst retaining the feel of the original.

Workshop 3 – Wool windings & basic weave structures

From collage to wool windings to basic card weaving structures.

Using a viewer to identify areas within the collage, participants further simplified designs to stripes which could be collaged, then wool matched to produce wool-windings and finally miniature weavings. These colour studies were used to inform the further development of the Cabrach Tweed.

Cabrach Tweed Products are now available to purchase.

Cabrach Tweed Blanket