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Crafts in Elgol on Skye by Marista Leishman
THERE ARE FEW craft shops in Scotland. Real craft shops. There are plenty calling themselves that – if, that is, you can be content with consumerist aisles showing mass produced glassware with statutory thistle, block candles, scented and decorated, nylon cuddlies heaped into small mountains and jerseys pretending to be different from all the other jerseys down the road.
Hermione Lamond, who runs the small post office at Elgol on Skye and uses any available space to display local, high quality craft work, says: ‘I firmly believe that if people make the effort to get to Elgol, then I should make the effort to make something a little different and not just show the mass produced stuff!’
This is a true craft shop, one whose goods are evidently made by hand, local hands at that, and are therefore essentially a part of the place. These are things that mean a lot to the purchaser, the marks of their individuality adding a value of a quite different order from the purchase price. Unrepeatable goods such as these, if you are lucky enough to find then, are made by potters, weavers, knitters, sculptors, painters, glassmakers, silver smiths and others. |
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Here, in each case, is one person’s ingenuity, skill, experience, and dedication – so that even a mistake, an irregularity, becomes a pleasing tribute to authenticity.
John Ruskin put it this way ‘..it is less the actual loveliness of the thing produced than the choice and invention concerned in the production, which are to delight us; the love and the thoughts of the workman more than his work..’
Ahead of the post office at Elgol a notice tells Murray and I that coffee and home baking are to be had. We had just returned from the long and slightly hazardous walk to Camasunary. Hermione carried our tray through to the adjoining committee room off the village hall from where we might enjoy the view across Loch Scavaig to the island of Soay. When, well content, we left we were carrying with us a brightly painted fishing float. Around it surged a sturdy trawler with churning bow wave, single seagull floating easefully above. A broad sea embraced the rounded surface and the Cuillin summits rose fiercely above.
A cheerful crowd of decorated floats were displayed across the post office window, a striking contract to the dreariness of the conventional post office. Hermione, as well as her family of four and her running of the post office, combed the long shore line for beached floats, their sizes, like their countries of origin, various. Each she would treat and paint, with similar but not identical themes. No wonder we treasure ours.
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