Inspired Stitches

Lynn Turner lives in a cottage overlooking the beautiful sea loch in Shieldaig, Torridon. She works part-time as  a designer and knitter, and sells her varied items that include crocheted bags, scarves, brooches and tea cosies in local craft shops and producers’ markets. Her achievements and success are enviable, but life has not always treated Lynn kindly.

A few years ago, she had a car accident that left her with an excruciating back injury. She was forced to give up her work as a landscape architect, and spent a lot of time at home, isolated from colleagues and without an income. Friends and family members’ birthdays loomed, and Lynn decided to make them presents instead of buy them. She shopped in local charity shops for yarn and kneedles, and using creative fair, inherited from her mother and encouraged by her sister, she knitted presents that were met with delight. Taking a holiday break, she found an old crochet hook on the window ledge of her holiday cottage and within minutes, she had taught herself to crochet too. Soon, she was hooked! She says, ‘After my back injury and enforced isolation, I lost my confidence and self-worth. I became clinically depressed. Creating something beautiful with yarn and needles or hook gave me back a feeling that I was good at  something, and productive, after all.’  From making presents and doing commissions, Lynn now spends much of the  wintertime knitting her stock, and then these are sold locally to enthusiastic customers during the spring and summer months.

Lynn is inspired mostly by the beauty of nature – the colours of the surrounding landscape are reflected in her yarn choices, and she experiments with textures to produce one-off works of art at an affordable price.

Typically, Lynn is modest about her achievements. She believes that anyone can knit or crochet if they just decide they want to, and an advanced floral design was her first attempt at knitting, years ago. She loved the pattern so much, she decided she would have a try, and with determination, success followed. She says, ‘Anyone can be a a good knitter by just learning how to cast on, cast off and knit and purl. It is a cheap hobby, because yarn and needles can almost always be found in charity shops.’

Lynn’s top tip: If you want to learn a technique or a type of stitch, then just access a search engine on the internet, and enter: ‘how to [name the technique/stitch]’. There are YouTube videos demonstrating just about every technique there is, and you can learn so much by looking at a close-up view of an expert showing how it is done.