DUNOLLIE’S fourth annual Fasanta textile festival and fashion show adorned Oban with trendy tweed and castle chic, and a new Firth of Lorn scarf.
The Fasanta festival, named after the Gaelic for ‘fashionable’, explores and celebrates Scotland’s textile heritage, and was inspired by Dunollie House’s incredible collection of 200 costumes and textiles dating back four centuries, unearthed in 2011. The three-day festival, running from Friday to Sunday, October 21-23, featured stalls, workshops, presentations and catwalk in Oban’s Corran Halls, and guided tours of Dunollie’s historic costumes.
Talk subjects included embroidered bed hangings by the National Museum’s textiles curator Naomi Tarrant, designing the new Cowal Tweed, and a ‘pechakuca’ (‘chit-chat’ in Japanese) by Ardalanish Weaving Mill. Workshops taught hand weaving, Dorset button making, and Catherine Gillies’s ‘wild chemistry lesson’ used natural dyes such as lungwort, madder and bramble. A Scottish sewing bee upcycled old tweed clothes from charity shops and modelled them on the catwalk.