Laura’s Loom Celebrates The Craft Of Hand-Weaving & Britain’s Tremendous Woollen Heritage

Hermes & Hestia
May 16, 2021
2 min read

Updated: May 26, 2021

Award winning, limited edition, ethical textiles, a year in the making Laura's Loom aim to create the highest quality products from British wool. Keeping it local, maintaining traceable provenance, and giving back to their local community.

Laura at her studio

Laura first learned to weave in the USA while working in Boston, MA. Laura's first loom, which she still use, was a Harrisville 50″ wide 8-shaft floor loom. "it feels like an extension of myself - I love weaving on it" she says. The loom has travelled with her to Europe and now to England where she lives and work in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales.

"Following a desire to create something beautiful from top quality Yorkshire Dales wool, I began to source fleece from local farms in 2008."

This new venture has taken Laura’s Loom into the realm of production weaving, working with small manufacturers across the north of England and into the Scottish Borders to create limited edition collections of British wool throws and scarves. Laura oversee the entire process, each year collecting bags of fleece from a dozen farms in the Yorkshire Dales and Cumbria, with the occasional addition of fleece from the far-flung outposts of Knoydart and Shetland. She sorts the wool in her back yard from there it is sent to Bradford for scouring. Laura's yarn is spun in West Yorkshire, dyed and woven in Langholm, and sent to cloth finishing mills in Galashiels and Huddersfield. All of the initial design and sampling is done by Laura, by hand, on her American Harrisville 8-shaft floor loom in her Yorkshire Dales studio.

The Yorkshire Howgills

Laura's enduring inspiration is the landscape, perhaps most especially the Howgills at the western edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, where she lives and works. Her choice of colours is influenced by the ever changing light on the fells which surround her home, throughout the seasons and throughout the year. Laura's designs aim to reflect the interplay of those colours as well as the hand of man in the mile upon mile of iconic drystone walls.