Helen Barwick is a designer who has created a brand new headband design inspired by orca, will all proceeds from the design going towards ORCA's conservation work. You can find the design on Ravelry here. Helen's tells us what inspired her to create this design and her journey with the incredible animal who we share a name with.
I’m Helen and I’m the designer of the Olnafirth Headband. I live in Shetland with my husband, but until last summer I was teaching Textiles at a secondary school in Central London.
My background is in sewing, but I can also weave, embroider and, most recently, knit. I learned to knit as a child (my nan was a keen knitter and I still have lots of the toys she made me) but I hadn’t kept it up. I could manage to cast on, do a simple garter stitch, then cast off - but that was the limit of my capabilities. I used to baulk at the thought of the kids I taught asking me to help them with their knitting projects. Shocking! I was the Textiles teacher, after all.
But then in the academic year of 2020/2021, the first full school year of COVID, the staff and students where I worked decided to set ourselves challenges to work towards through the year. You can reach your own conclusions why. Mine, of course, was knitting.
I very quickly became addicted to the slow rhythm of In, Round, Under, Off and in Spring 2023 I went to a Fair Isle knitting class. The teacher was from Shetland. Such was her passion for the place that I was inspired to take a “wool and wildlife” holiday, and I started designing my own colourwork patterns. Of course, when we got here we fell totally in love with the place - and the rest is history.
We’d lived here for four months when I spotted my first orca - a huge bull swimming up and down the firth outside my house. There’s more information about him and what happened in the pattern. We saw him every day for 10 days, and I found him absolutely majestic. We got to know the rhythm of his days and the sound of his breath every time he came up for air. After 10 days I was able to predict where he would surface, and for how long. I became something of an expert, in our orca but also in orcas more generally, as I did lots of research and chatted to other whale-watchers who came to see him. Cetaceans, like knitting, were now taking up a lot of my time.
A day or two before he left, I was pondering the beautiful monochrome markings on orcas. And that’s when the idea for the Olnafirth Headband came to me - because Fair Isle knitting is formed with patterns in bands of colour, with no more than two colours per row. So surely I could use black and white in a row to create an orca?
Of course, Shetland is a place full of nature-lovers and knitters (or “makkers” as they say up here) so I saw an opportunity to raise some funds for conservation work. All funds from the sale of the Olnafirth Headband Pattern will be donated to ORCA - and my hope is that by wearing their headbands “in the wild”, some whale-lovers will be ready to strike up conversations about these incredible animals, the some of the dangers they face and the work that ORCA do to help keep them safe.