Worn

Home — Worn

Garments are made as and when — as and when cloth is available, as and when designs are ready, as and when weather turns. Since this page shows garments being worn, it too is updated as and when, steadily through the year.

The gansey — which also goes by the name guernsey in certain coastal areas, and knit-frock in others (though that does seem like cruel and unusual parenting) — is made with geelong lambswool, washed in local waters in Scotland, and is knitted in the the south-west of the British Isles using slow and steady hand-framed techniques.

This particular gansey foregoes the decorative elements of its nautical ancestors — the cable-stitching, ladders, anchors, and other lovely village-of-origin details — in favour of a brutally to-the-point "heavy top-half and light lower" motif, and has shape and sizing better suited to the livelihoods of landlubbers.

The peacoat here is made with heavy melton wool, which is woven by a venerable old mill in the Heavy Woollen District of West Yorkshire. It's an establishment which has been supplying cloth for the military since before the American Civil War (for which, by the by, the mill was the supplier to both sides).

The crewneck is hand-linked — i.e. body and sleeve, sleeve and cuff and hem, are not stitched together. Instead, the tiny knit loops of each part are linked together, with a knitting needle, by a person with nimble and knowledgeable hands. Painfully slow work, as you might imagine, but the only way to achieve a soft and seamless finish.

Texture, here, very much up the wazoo. The yarn is again that very fine, very soft geelong lambswool from Scotland, and if you've ever hugged a sheep of the geelong family you'll know they're incomparably plush and fluffy. It's that same experience, then, just in wearable form: the entire upper body ensconced in warm sheep.

This is a shirt made with worsted cloth from the west of England (inappropriate shirting has been a staple at the workshop since 2009). It has what's called a Kelly collar, which is a fairly round collar cut with a little tab at the end of each point, which when fastened corral the collar together in a pleasing sticky-outy manner.

The balmacaan here is made with tweed of merino lambswool in a particularly wide herringbone design. It is woven exclusively and especially for the job by a mill run by a father and son in County Donegal, where such tweed — the soft handle, the multicoloured neps and burrs — has been the tradition for generations.

The crown of the watch cap is tuck-stitch, which is the undisputed champion, at least in these parts, of heartily and heavily textured knitwear. It is also a dense stitch, with the strands of yarn folded up and over each other again and again, and so helps keep in the heat very much in the manner of a military-standard tea-cosy.

Warms the body is what the bodywarmer does, and particularly the front of the body, being as it has a heavy eight-ply front. The back, however, is a fraction (27 per cent) of that weight, and thus the bodywarmer can be worn comfortably underneath a coat in winter, serving as a sturdy lambswool shield against the cold.

The thing with the boatneck is, well ... it's not complicated, exactly. But it is complex. It starts off straightforward enough, though, sure — living very much up to its name in featuring a boatneck, which is similar to a crewneck but wider at the sides and higher at the front and back.

But then it has the rolled edges, the differences in weight and stitch at the front and back, the turn-back cuffs, the inverted seams, and boldly cutting through the lot, a full gusset panel running all the way up the side of the body and down through the sleeve. It's a lot for a sweater to bear, and is why the design is possible thanks only to black-belt grade expertise in fully fashioned knitting — tying complexities together to present a sense of simplicity.

With a name like barathea, the cloth from which the field shirt is made was always likely to be a serious deal. It's a twill weave with a pebbly texture, woven in West Yorkshire, with the mercerised merino yarn, so imbued with the rare triumvirate of outstanding tensile strength, luxurious lustre, and a highly resilient springiness.

The popover this time is made with corduroy middle of weight and narrow of wale. It is very soft, particularly its interior, but, cord being a traditional working cloth, is also exceptionally hard-wearing. And, despite being soft and warm on cool days, it is very breathable, and so really rather good all year round.

"Happy to see the back of you!" — you hear it all the time here at the workshop. The back of every item is just as important as the front, see — e.g. the trucker has deep pleats (echoing those at the front) running down from a back yoke (in-line with one at the front) and twixt them sits a belt, which allows the body to be tightened up a little.

This is a trench made with heavy tweed woven in Scotland — in a mill inside an old boat-shed on the Morayshire coast, no less, with cast-iron weaving contraptions of Victorian heritage operated singlehandedly, and using the undyed wool of Herdwick sheep which spend their lives roaming free across the Lake District.

The field coat resides in the loose and unofficial category of technical outerwear. Generally, the category is to pigeonhole anything at the workshop which fastens with poppers rather than buttons. But the field coat really is quite technical, and a block of text such as this is arguably ill-suited for its bulletpointable feature-set.

It has your gusseted action-back, your adjustable belt, your poachers pocket, your loose bellows pockets, your hidden belt channel for wearers belt-averse, etc. But it balances all this with a soft and round collar and soft and round pockets, and is most of the time quiet and modest and an expert only at minding its own business.

Seems only fitting that the balmacaan, being named after an ancient forested estate, comes in a colour known as forest green. It's so deep and dark and dewy in greenness one can almost whiff the pine needles, almost hear the chirps of the willow warbler, almost expect Chris Packham to bound out any moment.

And if you happen to look more closely, you'll realise the tweed is also replete with fluffy wee nuggets of chalk and auburn and burgundy — which is what tends to happen when yarn gets spun by the oldest and perhaps only still-standing spinning mill in Donegal. They not only enliven the cloth and make every square centimetre of it unique, they enhance the base colours of the cloth, which is itself no accident thanks to it being a recipe concocted by the mill that weaves the cloth. It makes for very lively and region-specific woodland.