Scratching the nostalgia itch with her fresh take on the so-called ‘granny blanket’, Sarah Dawson is connecting heritage with legacy, and memory with imagination.
I reckon every Irish person has a memory of baking under the itchy torment of a pink and cream Kerry Woollen Mills blanket. “Oh, you mean the granny blankets?”, a friend asked me when I described the memory of scratching my way out of the coarse throw I had been wrapped in as a sleepy child.
“Granny blankets” is probably the most identifiable way of referring to these prickly covers. Sheets, duvets and quilts now layer our beds, where just one of these hot covers would have sufficed back in the day.
Given that almost every household in Ireland has at least one of these blankets stowed away in the attic, it is no wonder that Sarah Dawson had plenty of material to work with when setting up her Blanket Productions stall at Tiny Traders Market in Galway in 2020. The stall has become a beloved staple where people pick up jackets, coats and waistcoats made out of these nostalgic blankets.
“They do seem to remind everyone of their granny!”, she admits. “They’re not for everyone, but they get such a reaction, people coming and saying ‘oh no! The itchy blanket’ and sharing their memories.”
Dawson first started sewing blankets into coats back in the 1980s for friends and family who were fed up with holding blankets around themselves on long summer nights out in the garden. “I’m not someone who sews really,” she tells me, explaining that the patterns and designs she is now known for are the result of a “little formula I figured out and have just stuck to.”
Although she is bashful about her work – “I just chop them into squares and rectangles and sew them back together again” – each one-of-a-kind piece is clearly the result of a delicate craft and a thoughtful reimagining.
Fashion and beauty historian and historical content creator Laura Fitzachary tells me that Dawson’s work is arguably part of a much longer lineage in the history of woollen production in Ireland. “From even the 18th and 19th centuries, right up until the 20th century, your wool coat also doubled up as your blanket,” she explains. While Dawson’s work reaches back to the savviness of our ancestors in making the most of materials readily at their disposal, her designs bring an uncanny and fresh twist to what are otherwise familiar robes.
Dawson, originally from the UK but living in Ireland for over thirty years now, has been curious to learn of a tradition in Connemara “where people would make waistcoats from their blankets,” reinforcing the sense of time and history palpable in the work that she does. “You can feel that you’re going back to something,” she explains.
According to Fitzachary, wool production in Ireland was a booming business in the 1700s, with woollen mills sure to be found in almost every town. The tough but warming quality of the Irish fleece made weaving a much valued craft across the country before anti-competition laws, the famine and the rise of synthetic material production cumulatively served to collapse the cottage industry over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
All of this, you could say, is woven into the blankets that Dawson retrieves from second-hand shops and attic clear-outs. When it comes to the Kerry Woollen Mills blankets in particular – with the mill being what Fitzachary would describe as “the last vestiges of the traditional woollen industry in Ireland” – the stark bands of cream and pink represent the possible resilience of this traditional craft and material.
It is a welcome reminder at a moment in time when Ireland’s woollen industry is fighting for renewal. The Irish Wool Grown Council was set up in 2023 and has done much to draw attention — and hopefully inspire solutions — to the fact that wool prices have plummeted to a point that shearing now costs farmers more than the wool is worth. We literally have more wool than we know what to do with, and this council and other local efforts, such as Galway Wool, are forging a space for people to think creatively about the future of the industry and the path it could open up for pioneering more circular modes of consumption and production.
“I really refrain from using buzzwords because I just think it’s common sense,” Dawson says of using old blankets and, more broadly, local materials. “But it is so good to use what you’ve got locally,” she shrugs matter-of-factly. “It just makes so much more sense.”
Though Dawson’s stall at Tiny Traders might seem small to a passerby, it is part of a much bigger push to embrace traditional Irish symbols, ideas and materials in recent years – and the possibility of including heritage crafts and textile production in this movement.
Dawson launched Blanket Productions proper in 2020 when she started selling her work at Kinvara Market, but she never expected it to strike the chord that it seemingly has. It did not take long for word to spread about her new take on old blankets, and people flocked to her stall to pick up their own or drop in family quilts that needed a new lease on life. The nostalgia of the blankets, the sense of familiarity and home that they espouse, seemed to draw people in – but the evolving designs kept them coming back.
Though Dawson has sold some of her pieces in a select few independent shops, she prefers the connection she gets to the customer by manning her own stall. “I love seeing who buys what,” she laughs. “It does feel quite serendipitous because often I’ll make one and I’m thinking, ‘oh, I wonder who that’s going to be for’ and then somebody will turn up and they’re home from America or Australia and trek back with a jacket that’s the perfect fit,” she explains.
“I think there’s a sort of magic to it in a way,” Dawson reflects. “These blankets have had a life before that we can’t really grasp, and then they’ll come and find somebody else who will carry on that whole story.”
There is something magical about the connection between the supposed opposites of heritage and legacy, memory and imagination, nostalgia and newness, scratchy and comforting. But Dawson’s pieces seem to reconcile such contradictions, and serve as a timely reminder, in case you dared forget, that your granny was always right.
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