How do you start designing not just a garment, but an entire yarn range? With a sense of excitement, for there is a whole spectrum to play with and the possibilities are dizzying. In choosing and designing the first shades for my new Hebridean yarn range, I decided to go stravaigin, which is an old Scots word meaning to wander about in a casual manner. For example, on a Saturday night, the local youths will stravaig the toun in pursuit of fun. I went in pursuit of colour. My stravaigins were both literal and metaphorical, along old paths to old haunts around the Island of Lewis and Harris, and down quite a few Memory Lanes. On the literal paths I collected shells and stones; plants and mosses; feathers and leaves and berries. Anything that took my fancy. On the metaphorical paths I collected thoughts and fancies; daydreams and tales, both tall and true. It made me think hard about this island of mine, so I make no apology if the following written stravaigins appear to be overly discursive, but please feel free to skip.

Any author who writes about small islands eventually has to tackle the split personality that is inherent in the island perspective. The islander must look outwards for anything other than a basic living, and many have to leave in order to find it. I know that feeling well, for as a 17 year old, I was outward bound on the boat the very next day after I left school. This was not to escape anything - far from it, for I had wonderful parents. I simply had to see what was over the horizon. Yet, no matter how far an islander ventures - even if they seldom return - that solid, rocky heart of the island is always with them, balanced against a shifting sea.

One author who has balanced this equation better than most is Tim Robinson in his masterly Stones of Aran. He saw the coastline of Aranmor in terms of a pilgrimage, while the interior he saw as a labyrinth. I tend to have a simpler view, embodied in the characters of my maternal grandfather and grandmother. Alexander Macleod from the village of Upper Bayble, Isle of Lewis, lived to be 96 and was a fisherman for the whole of his working life. In those days they didn't travel very far to do their courting, and his wife Anne Macaulay came from the neighbouring village of Sheshader, just a short hike over the moor away. Anne lived to within one month of 100 years and never once set foot off the island of her birth. What better image for the split in the island personality? It is rather like the Yin and the Yang. The male Yang principle could stand for the sea, while the female Yin could be the island interior. But no, the analogy doesn't work, for the Yin is dark while the Yang is light, and both land and seascape depend on light and dark equally for their full visual impact.

I have strayed onto abstruse territory but my digression has been brief, so I hope you will forgive me. I will confine my thoughts to a more basic level. The two great visual aspects of my native Hebridean island can be categorised as Moor & Mountain versus Sea & Shoreline. Some of my happiest childhood memories are from the Lewis moor, and so it is there that my colour story begins.