Cricket Cooper learned to knit as a five-year-old from her British grandmother. From there, her passion grew to also include crocheting and small-loom weaving and she has taught knitting, spindle spinning, and Tunisian crochet. A self-professed “fiber pilgrim,” Cricket has enjoyed Shetland Wool Week and various US-based retreats plus a fiber cruise from Copenhagen through Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New York. Today, she lives as close to Shetland as she can get, in Bar Harbor, Maine, where life on a windswept and remote corner of the US soothes her soul between visits to the Shetland isles. She writes and reads all things fiber, dreams of owning her own small flock of sheep, and is currently getting to know a refurbished, four-harness Harrisville loom.
What began as a visit to explore the Shetland Islands’ Viking heritage and knitting traditions soon became something much bigger for Helen Hart: an entirely new way of life.