This handmade wool skirt, first made in the 1960s, has been altered to fit several wearers. At one point it had two straps that effectively made it into a pinafore, and it fitted a 3-year-old. Its current incarnation fits a 5-year-old and a pleat was let out to do that. Seamus tells us:
This is a skirt made by my Auntie Rita that has now been passed down to us. It was made sometime in the 1960s for one of my sisters. It would have been worn by my sisters and their children, now all adults. It is now worn by my daughter. I see myself as the custodian of this skirt rather than the owner, because it’s a family object that is passed from generation to generation. It’s reminiscent of older Gaelic ways of looking at the notion of ownership, such as my great-great-great-grandfather Niall MacPherson, the Bard of the Braes in Skye, who expressed this notion in his evidence to the Napier commission about the condition of crofters in the 1880s, where land was the communal property. Like the land, the skirt is a communally-owned object.
Threads of Belonging 