journal

If you think $500 for an Alice Starmore book is a bargain, you’ll love…

Her old Mac IIci.

Obviously, knitters who will enter into desperate bidding wars to procure Starmore’s out-of-print books would jump at the chance to own this piece of Knitting History™.  After all, if you can’t own the book, you can always own the computer that was used to create the charts for The Scottish Collection!

This “true piece of knitting and computing history” is offered with a letter of authenticity signed by Alice Starmore to brandish in the face of your jealous knitting friends.  However, it is not offered in working condition.  Note that the hard drive has allegedly given up the ghost and has been removed.  So you can forget that idea of rescuing the original pattern files from the hard drive.

Hurry!  The starting bid is a low, low, 10 GBP!  (Plus shipping.)

 (Thanks, Milinda!)

Penultimate spin

Since the UK magazine Knitting only ran a glowing article about Rowan Scottish Tweed and the Carloway mill in February, perhaps it is still timely to follow up on the end of the Harris Tweed legal showdown.

As mentioned at the end of this post, the action launched by the Harris Tweed Authority (HTA) against Coats (owner of Rowan) and Harris Tweed Textiles (HTTL), the company supplying Rowan with the yarn presently known as Scottish Tweed, was settled. Rowan rebranded its Harris yarn as Scottish Tweed last year — thereby introducing the word “Tweed” into the yarn name itself — and retailers are still selling off the stock with the old labels. It hasn’t completely ended, though, as there is yet to be an assessment of legal costs.

Two views
The announcement of the settlement on the HTA website is rather brief: undertakings not to infringe HTA’s trademark rights, and not to use “Harris Tweed”, “Harris Yarn”, or the domain name “harris-tweed.co.uk” in association with yarn. (It’s a standard provision in most settlement agreements relating to intellectual property rights that a party will not infringe those rights in future, whether there was an admission or finding of past infringement or not.)

The report of HTA’s victory elsewhere by Alice Starmore is a little more sanguine, and takes the opportunity to riff a bit on the subject of creativity and hand knitwear design: the defendants “finally caved in to all demands” and the HTA “won” their case; the defendants will probably try to avoid paying the court-ordered legal costs; the defendants are infringers and criminals; the defendants have had the gall to rebrand their yarn as “Scottish” Tweed; she suggests that Rowan has lost its innovative edge, and cautions all would-be hand knitting designers not to bother trying, because someone will just rip you off in the end; and she turns a bit ghoulish when she describes an accident at Carloway mill. Oh, and she mocks Di Gilpin’s work. (I prefer ghoulishness in relating business or legal affairs, not incidents in which a man nearly died. As for Gilpin, I personally do prefer Starmore’s designs to Gilpin’s, but I wouldn’t wear either of them.)

To clarify, what HTA “won” in court was legal costs. And unlike Starmore, HTA didn’t call the defendants’ activities infringements; the HTA press release doesn’t say that an admission of infringement was involved, merely that an undertaking not to infringe was given. If Starmore is privy to the terms of settlement, perhaps she’d like to share more of them with us.

Based on Starmore’s reporting (the bullet points near the bottom of this page), it appears that the legal costs were granted because the defendants stood their ground and did not attempt to negotiate, causing HTA to continue the action with the attendant expense. I’m a little puzzled by this, because the yarn was in the process of being renamed “Scottish Tweed” before the action was finally settled; but who knows what (lack of) communication transpired.

More interesting, though, are Starmore’s thoughts on the industry in general.

Retreading old ground
A little more of Starmore’s past history comes out when she mentions that she was a creditor of Rowan when it went bankrupt in 1995. The implication in the following paragraphs of her epilogue is that after its acquisition by Coats, Rowan had become morally and creatively bankrupt, as well.

She asks what happened to Rowan’s “innovation.” I find myself wondering what she means. Does she mean a lack of innovation in design? Perhaps the designs published by Rowan ten years ago were a little more elaborate, but on the other hand, perhaps the evolution of Rowan design philosophy to minimalism (with intermittent Fassett and Mably plumage) is a response to demand from knitters for simpler designs.

Still, some of the designers in Rowan’s pattern books pre-1995 are the same as the designers in the books published after the Coats acquisition: Kaffe Fassett, Annabel Fox, Jean Moss, Kim Hargreaves, Sharon Peake, Erika Knight, Sarah Dallas, Sasha Kagan. Some of them have gone on to establish independent design portfolios or yarn lines in recent years. (And I have no idea if those designers did so as a result of a falling out with Coats-owned Rowan, or if they simply realized that they, too, could produce patterns and an eponymous range of yarns, with increased name recognition, just like Alice Starmore did. I hope that Starmore isn’t upset with them for stealing her idea of branching out on their own, too.)

Does she mean the gorilla-like armwarmers and other devices that appear to have been designed at the last minute before publication, and are intended to use only small quantities of mega-bulky yarn? If so, the problem is not simply Rowan lacking creativity; as part of the resurgence of knitting, a market has been built up for quick projects demanding few skills and less yarn. That may be the fault of the customers, or it may be the fault of the industry players who created that demand in the first place.

Does she mean a lack of innovation in yarns? While we’ve seen the regrettable loss of classic yarns since the Coats takeover (remember, one mill that supplied Rowan with some of those classic yarns closed down a while ago, so some discontinuations may not have been by Coats’s choice), we’ve seen the introduction of new yarns that clearly show that the company is willing to take risks (R2 comes to mind) and to introduce new concepts in hand knitting yarns (such as Calmer). They’ve even successfully created a market for luxury laceweight yarn–and they’ve been so successful, that their Kidsilk Haze has been dubbed “Cracksilk Haze” in blogland. Certainly, the objective is to make money for Coats, but means that they have chosen to achieve that end has resulted in more variety for the consumer (and for me, a cotton-blend yarn that I don’t mind knitting). And in the meantime, Rowan has apparently been trying to establish a yarn line to replace the old Donegal Lambswool Tweed and other DK and lighter yarns.

(K)nitpicks
Starmore seems to admit that Rowan is having yarn manufactured in Scotland when she recounts in her epilogue that some American knitters are planning to visit an unnamed Lewis mill. (However, I’m not certain if her mock incredulity isn’t also directed at the use of the term “factory” in place of “mill.”) Prior to that, she also claims that the Rowan Harris yarn (which, note, she herself mislabels as “Harris Tweed yarn”) could not have been “entirely constructed” by HTTL on Lewis, but does not explain why. That missing detail reminds me that the description of her own yarn does not advise that her own products are produced entirely on Lewis (her yarn tags state “Great Britain”), so that jibe seems a little disingenuous.

And on the subject of the Rowan yarn, Starmore states that when she examined it she found it was “made from wool of bog-standard quality and of equally standard knopped construction”. I can’t speak of the relative qualities of Scottish Tweed yarn and Starmore’s Hebridean yarns, but I wonder if she could have possibly meant “standard knopped construction” as a criticism:

At left, Rowan Scottish Tweed DK in brilliant pink; center, Rowan Scottish Tweed 4 ply in midnight (overexposed to show as much colour as possible — overall, the colour reads as darkest blue-black); and right, Alice Starmore Hebridean 3 ply (worsted weight). To be fair, the Starmore yarn appears smoothest overall, because it is composed of three plies to the Scottish Tweed’s two plies. I haven’t got any samples of Hebridean 2 ply to compare. But I still see knops, such as that green one the upper right-hand corner.

The Hebridean 3 ply has approximately 100 metres per 50g skein at 5.50GBP; Scottish Tweed DK has 113 metres per 50g ball at 4.21GBP, not including VAT, meaning that for a generous sweater’s worth of yarn, the Scottish Tweed would likely be cheaper, even once shipping costs are added. (Virtual Yarns offers free shipping for orders over 12GBP.) Hebridean 3 ply is available in about three dozen shades, Scottish Tweed DK in 16 colours.

The Hebridean 2 ply has approximately 85 metres per 25g skein at 2.80GBP; Scottish Tweed 4 ply has 110 metres per 25g skein. Both are intended for use for stranded colourwork, but the Scottish Tweed seems to be closer in yarn weight to typical yarns for Fair Isle-type knitting, such as Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift; according to the numbers, Starmore’s Hebridean 2 ply is thicker. But if we compare the cost per yardage, the Rowan Scottish Tweed is a bit cheaper than Hebridean 2 ply. Hebridean 2 ply is available in the same three dozen shades as the 3 ply, and Scottish Tweed 4 ply is available in 24 colours.

This comparison suggests that at present, Starmore’s main advantage (aside from her design catalogue) over the competing Rowan Scottish Tweed line is the number of available colours — and some of the colours of Scottish Tweed, in fact, are exceedingly similar to colours in the Hebridean line. (I would not say identical, since these yarns are spun at different mills, and as far as I know the wool is dyed by different people.)

And it seems to me that therein lies Starmore’s reason for reporting on HTA’s dispute with Rowan and HTTL: she wanted an excuse to air her own grievances against a competitor, because she must not have any other recourse. She has complained that they have attempted to copy her “Hebridean Yarn Concept” and her colours; what is missing in her complaint is a clear statement that in doing so, they had transgressed her rights (beyond copying one webpage containing terms and conditions). Given that she calls HTTL “infringers” and “criminals”, one might think that she wouldn’t shrink from making further allegations if she thought she could make them stick. But as it is, after reading her three-part tale plus epilogue, I came away with the impression that the worst crime committed by HTTL, in Starmore’s eyes, is that they decided to compete. Against her.

The end… or is it?
One passage in Starmore’s epilogue is almost cryptic:

I have never known of a genuinely creative person who is confined to a single field of expression. That is not the way the creative mind works: never has and never will. If original creative work is abused by those seeking a free ride, then the creators simply turn to some other medium. Those who support and collude in such abuse can only expect to be becalmed in the dull doldrums of plagiarism and ersatz design values.

Since the above statement was posted, there have been few additions to Starmore’s online shop: new photographs of an existing design, an adaptation of an old Starmore design in the new yarns, and adaptations of a couple of designs from Jade Starmore’s first book — but no new designs. In fact, it has been a while since any new designs were published. Thus, this statement was cause for concern among Starmore fans: was this her way of saying that she will not be designing any more knitwear?

I’ve heard of one person e-mailing Virtual Yarns to put that question squarely to Alice Starmore; I haven’t heard that any response has been provided. After decades in the field, if Starmore had chosen to effectively retire from designing hand knits and move on to some other medium, that would be an understandable decision; but to go out on such a sour note? Is she suggesting that her competitors should be blamed for driving her out of this industry? Or is she only taking a break, and leaving her diehard customers with a cliffhanger?

More geographic miracles

The Harris Tweed Cardigan, from KnitPicks. Made from non-tweedy yarn produced on a continent that most definitely does not include any of the Hebridean isles. Inquiring minds would like to know whether the Harris Tweed Authority or those who would voice their opinions on their competitors’ activities has a reaction.

I also wish the HTA would get rid of those damn pop-ups.

I just received a Scottish Tweed colour card and yarn in the mail yesterday; I need to take some photographs before I write my long-overdue wrap-up.

Yarn reincarnated?

I didn’t care for their superwash wool, but I was sorry to hear that production issues caused Mission Falls to make the decision to cease operations (the yarn distribution — doesn’t mean you won’t see Mags Kandis’s designs in future).

Mission Falls 1824 cotton had been discontinued earlier because of quality problems. I think that was a greater loss in the scheme of yarn–there are other heavy worsted weight superwash wools available from other companies, but very few — if any — cottons comparable to 1824. 1824 cotton had a gimp structure (a binder thread wrapped around a single), which made the yarn softer on the hands than a plied cotton yarn. Silk City’s Softball yarns are somewhat similar (it uses two binder threads rather than the single binder of 1824, yet doesn’t appear to be as tightly wrapped), but it’s available in DK and chunky weights, not heavy worsted.

But now Sweaterkits is selling a cotton yarn called Cotton Licious, which looks suspiciously like the former 1824 yarn — right down to the colours. [This morning, I sent them an e-mail asking if it’s from the same mill, and if the colours were the same. I received a non-responsive answer.]

Speaking of similar colours, may I point out that certain shades of Rowan Scottish Tweed yarn match certain shades of a certain Hebridean yarn, although not in all weights of Scottish Tweed.

Scottish Tweed, by the way, is the new name of Rowan’s Harris yarn, as someone pointed out in the comments a while ago. Of course none of the parties who previously commented on the legal dispute over the name of Harris yarn has published any sort of press release (to my knowledge, at least) — no update from Herself, known for publicly bashing her competitors; no public comment from the parties who are actually involved in the legal dispute (Rowan, HTTL, and HTA). Rowan’s and HTTL’s silence is not surprising, since they refrained from issuing a press release about the lawsuit when it was commenced, although HTTL’s chair did speak to at least one reporter and Rowan did apparently write to retailers about the Harris issue; however, the Harris Tweed Association, which had announced on its website that it had filed the lawsuit and garnered some press coverage, has not updated its site with any news on the progress of the action.

The absence of public updates about the lawsuit is not unusual. If you searched the newswires for announcements regarding legal actions, you’d probably find that there are a lot more press releases announcing their commencement than their resolution. There can be a number of reasons for this discrepancy: the plaintiff (likely the one issuing the first press release) might have achieved only a lacklustre result, or perhaps even lost at trial; the public might have no interest in the outcome, so there would be no point in issuing a further press release; or a settlement might have involved confidentiality terms, which again might make a press release pointless. Sometimes you can ferret out more information; if one of the companies involved is publicly traded, for example, you can probably find information about the status of ongoing litigation in its financial statements. Court documents are generally public documents too, although obtaining copies costs money (and settlement terms may not be included in the court record).

[That UK magazine, Knitting, published a short piece on both the Harris yarn dispute and Alice Starmore’s beef with HTTL in its August 2005 issue. Unfortunately, that article, which presents the points of view of HTA and Starmore, doesn’t contain much more content than what is already available on the Internet; you’d get the same information by reading the HTA press release and the Virtual Yarns website. Pity that the author of the article, who is in Stornoway, didn’t get any further information from any of the parties, including HTTL. The article also failed to mention the name change to Scottish Tweed, which makes Knitting seem a little behind on its reportage; although given the frequency of publication and the lead time necessary to prepare an article for such a magazine, that was to be expected.]

So what does it mean that the name of the yarn has been changed by Rowan? It could mean a settlement, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that HTA was right about the use of “Harris” to describe yarn — there’s still no court determination of the issue. What this could mean is that decision-makers on all sides figured out that the most efficient use of their resources was a compromise; Rowan might have agreed to change its labelling without any acknowledgement of infringement or liability, and HTA might not have received any compensation at all.

Edited to add: The action was indeed settled, and the plaintiff received its legal costs. I think I still have that post in draft.

The yarn gets juicier

What with the constant checking for real news updates recently, I didn’t think to check, so I’m not certain how recently the next part of the Harris yarn was posted.

The new material: photographs used to advertise the forthcoming (but didn’t) Hebridean-themed yarns from HTTL featured Gilpin designs, but not the Hebridean-themed yarn, since it wasn’t available yet; ditto for the photographs used on the page announcing the Rowan venture (which explains why one might have considered the Gilpin designs kinda dated?).

Of more interest to the meddling knitter is the “obscene, abusive and threatening” fax of last month…

Tangled webs

Here’s the 5-cent tour of Herself’s latest installment, and then the stuff that’s independently verifiable, in convenient tabular format…
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She calls it a geographic miracle

Starmore starts with a prologue.

Starmore complains about an announcement (PDF) published by a third-party retailer, Upcountry, referencing the “Harris Tweed Company,” which doesn’t actually exist. She also mentions shade cards for “Harris Arran” yarn that had been distributed, perhaps directly by HTTL (not clear). The saga begins to sound like a Scotland v. English ignorance rant.

But wait, there’s more…

Alice Starmore dishes.

This statement follows on the story that was printed in The Herald on May 14. This was the article that reported that Starmore claimed that HTTL had stolen part of her website content, and that HTTL was going to engage in a “crude and audacious theft” of her work by producing hand knitting yarns to be called “Hebridean.”

Well.

In the story Starmore recounts of he said-she said-she said,

• The chair of HTTL allegedly told a BBC reporter that Starmore was also making some unauthorized use of the Harris Tweed trademark. The BBC reporter apparently discovered this to be untrue.
• Starmore got a chance to rebut this, and apparently told the BBC reporter a lot of what she knew about HTTL.
• The BBC reporter related Starmore’s comments back to the chair of HTTL, who apparently went “ballistic” (as told by BBC reporter to Starmore); the HTTL chair also apparently uttered something about Starmore being in breach of an agreement and of a previous legal action she brought against HTTL that was later withdrawn.
• Di Gilpin, apparently also informed of Starmore’s comments about HTTL, called the BBC reporter too, and apparently told said BBC reporter that the HTTL chair had told her that Starmore was going to sue her (Gilpin). Then Gilpin apparently backed off this statement and referred the BBC reporter to her partner, a lawyer.
• When contacted, this lawyer stated to the BBC reporter that he was not aware of any legal action between Starmore and HTTL/Gilpin, and that he was not aware of Starmore being in breach of any agreement.
• Starmore states in response to the article that she has never entered into any agreement with the chair of HTTL and his companies, and in response to Gilpin’s allegations, that she has never threatened her with any legal action. She then suggests that Gilpin is either delusional or grievously misinformed by HTTL.

My conclusions:

• It’s not clear whether the BBC reporter would have arrived at the same conclusion regarding HTTL’s allegation of Starmore’s use of the Harris Tweed mark had the 2004 version of the Virtual Yarns website content been live. And it’s not clear if this previous website copy was the usage alluded to by HTTL, or if there was something else we don’t know about.
• This statement doesn’t contradict the allegations made by Starmore that HTTL copied her website content. Indeed, Starmore provide a link to another article that repeats these allegations concerning HTTL’s prospective launch of “Hebridean” yarn. I came away from this further article with the impression that Starmore is trying to lay claim to the concept of selling a line of knitting yarns based on her native landscape.
• Starmore’s statement denies any contractual arrangement with any company associated with the chair of HTTL, Derek Reid. Her statement does not deny that she has had a legal dispute with HTTL, although no action actually resulted. It’s not uncommon for non-lawyers, even businesspeople, to misapply terms such as “action” and “proceedings.” To many, correspondence such as a cease-and-desist letter from an adverse party’s lawyer is a legal action or a proceeding, even though to the lawyer, it isn’t any such thing until a complaint, petition, or statement of claim is filed with a court. I’m inclined to cut HTTL some slack for that statement, but Starmore, who is not unfamiliar with lawyers, held them to the strict interpretation of their (alleged) words. In her position, I’d do that, too.
• Starmore does state in this further article that she contracted with the principal of the predecessor company of HTTL (that is to say, the principal of the company that used to occupy the same space as HTTL currently does, and was apparently dissolved the same year as HTTL was formed). She describes that she commissioned this spinner, Donald Macleod, “in a private capacity” — whatever that means, I don’t know. Because the company was private? Did he work alone on the development of her yarn? Is this a way of saying that any supply contract between Macleod and Starmore was not assignable to a successor company?
• If you’re going to design hand knitwear in Scotland, the first thing you have to do is get yourself a lawyer for a spouse/partner. Seems to be a prerequisite.

Edit: Oh… and it appears that HTTL removed the link to Di Gilpin’s website from their own website. It was there the last time I looked, which was… last week? Two weeks ago?

Second-hand update

The word through the e-grapevine is that at least one retailer has been advised that the matter between HTA and Rowan is settled, but none of the known parties involved has posted any update or press release, and it hasn’t been picked up by the media that reported the lawsuit in the first place.

This may have been premature. I made an inquiry of HTTL, and while they (rightfully) didn’t say anything about the status of the lawsuit, the response I received certainly did not sound like there was a settlement. The response did suggest, however, HTTL had never itself referred to its yarn product as “Harris Tweed,” but that it was erroneously called by that name by online retailers.

Change of ownership?

Now that I’ve been able to get through to the Way Back Machine, I’ve done the requisite poking around.

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