Our Process
We design, weave and knit everything here in our workshop in Tuamgraney, and have done since 1991. Every piece starts as an idea, goes through a process of designing, sampling and refining, and ends up finished by hand before it leaves the building. Here is how it all happens.
Our Raw Materials
There are about 3.8 million sheep in Ireland, so most people assume that we use Irish wool. We don't, and there is a good reason for that. Irish wool comes from hardy breeds like Blackface and Cheviot. These sheep are bred first for meat, with wool as a by-product. It's a strong, coarse fibre, excellent for carpets, tweed and rugs, but far too rough to wear against the skin.
A scarf sits at your neck and face; softness isn't a nice-to-have, it's the whole point. Irish wool also doesn't take fine or vibrant colour the way finer fibres do — and colour is where everything starts for us. So while everything is made here in Ireland, the wool itself isn't Irish. We work mainly with merino, prized for being exceptionally fine and soft enough to wear against the skin without a hint of itch, and it takes colour in a way coarser wool can't. About two-thirds of the merino we use is mulesing-free. The rest isn't, and that's not an oversight. Non-mulesed wool gets scarcer the finer it is, so at the fineness we need, 100% simply isn't available yet. And mulesing itself isn't the simple cruelty it's sometimes made out to be: it exists to prevent flystrike, a serious welfare problem in its own right, which makes this a genuine trade-off, not a case of farmers not caring about their sheep.
All of our merino yarn is spun in Italy, where generations of expertise in fine spinning give us the consistency we need. Alongside merino, we use alpaca from Peru which is warmer than wool for its weight, and has a soft, almost silky handle. Alpacas have been bred in the Andes for thousands of years for exactly this quality of fibre and we really like to use it for our lacy knits.
Designing
People imagine that ideas just arrive, that they float around somewhere and land in a designer's head. In reality, designing is a way of looking at the world and being willing to make decisions, and then change your mind. I am always asking: is this nice? Does it work? What can I change to make it work? And sometimes: who would buy it, and why? The world doesn't need any more scarves, but it needs beauty, and in our case, scarves are our canvas. I'm not trying to just design a scarf, I'm trying to make a piece that someone is going to fall in love with.
What Eugene and I always had in common, even before either of us knew what we would end up doing, was that we have both been making things since we were children. That hasn't really changed. Everything here — the workshop, the collections, the buildings, the café — grew out of that one simple fact, and the same question we keep asking: is this the best version?
A new collection is 50 to 60 styles, each in around 10 colours, and there is only one way to get there: start. Every new design goes through countless rounds of sampling and adjustment before it's right. Make something. Change it. Change it again. That's the process.
It also makes a big difference to have enough time. I always wish I could see something for the first time without being invested in it. When there's enough time, we can walk away from a decision and look at it again with fresh eyes a few weeks later. And even then, mistakes happen. Sometimes at a trade fair I'll look at something and think, why did I pick that blue, it doesn't really go with anything. And sometimes I'm genuinely surprised by how good something looks, especially once I see it on someone — not just the piece itself, but how well it suits the person wearing it, how it can make a personality pop.
Weaving
Eugene and Anya weave on our Hattersley Domestic looms. They are cast-iron shuttle looms built by George Hattersley & Sons in Keighley, West Yorkshire, around 1900. Nobody makes them anymore, so every loom we own had to be found and restored. We taught ourselves how, and if something breaks, we can fix it ourselves too. They were originally treadle looms, worked by foot; ours now run on a motor, though it's still the hand and the eye that set each one up and watch over it as it weaves.
The loom has a narrow weaving width which is perfect for scarves and the shuttle leaves a woven selvedge on every piece: a clean, finished edge on both sides that no modern wide loom can produce. What we like is that the machine itself sets the limits. Working inside what a 19th-century loom can and can't do keeps the focus on what it does best: colour and texture.
Before any of that, though, the loom has to be dressed. The warp is made on a horizontal warping mill — long enough for around 40 scarves at a time — then beamed and tied onto the loom, thread by thread. It's slow work: making a Cosmo warp alone can take three hours, and tying it on means knotting 720 individual threads which adds another couple of hours. There is no shortcut for it, it takes patience, and a dexterity that only comes from doing it again and again.
Knitting
Knitting came later for us than weaving, but it has become just as central to what we do, and these days it has overtaken weaving in importance to the business. Going more modern with weaving would have meant a big factory with a massive output, because weaving is always mass production once you've set up the loom. Knitting made production on a smaller scale possible, and opened up a whole design side too.
Before we started knitting, we just had 2 staff, and now there are 20 of us working in scarf making. Our first Stoll knitting machine arrived in 2012, and we have added five more since. They are all modern, computerised machines, in two different gauges. Learning a new trade was genuinely exciting, and in a lot of ways it still is: we are always trying to come up with new techniques specific to scarves. These machines let us work with structural stitches, lace, jacquard, and intarsia.
Knitting also lets us do something weaving can't: shape. A woven scarf is always a rectangle, but a knitted one doesn't have to be — we can make half circles, triangles, and other shapes a loom simply can't produce. Every design starts on software, stitch by stitch, long before it goes near a machine, and it takes countless hours of experimentation to get right. One thing I insist on: reversibility. Both sides of a scarf are on show when it's worn, so both have to work. Olan, our knitting engineer, works full time running the machines day to day and is great at his job, and our son Ben, who has gotten into knitting too, helps out when we need him. We are a small, niche company, and specialising in scarves means we can put a disproportionate amount of effort into getting each one right. It's fun.
The Finishing Touches
The woven scarves are cut after they come off the loom, then Joanna takes them home to knot the tassels by hand. They get checked for loose threads, which get darned in.
A knitted scarf, meanwhile, has to be separated by hand from the rest of the run it came off in, with the ends sewn in. From here, each piece goes into an industrial wash with eco-friendly detergent, which shrinks it by about a third and brings the small fibres to the surface — that's what makes it so soft. Five minutes in an industrial dryer, then it gets labelled and ironed: textured knitted scarves go on a steam table, flat ones on an ironing board, and woven scarves run through a steam roller ironing machine, which leaves them flat, gives them a slight sheen, and helps them drape properly.
The last inspection happens right there during ironing: the edges get checked, each piece is folded, and then we send it out into the world.