FAR-FLUNG TREASURES

27th March 2025

Iseabal Hendry is using thoroughly modern luxury objects to bring Scottish traditional crafts into your home. Words by Laura McCreddie-Doak.

Iseabal Hendry is talking about basket weaving with the kind of enthusiasm you get when someone saw their favourite band in a secret gig at Glastonbury. “I’m absolutely over the moon,” she is saying about her Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust award – a programme dedicated to supporting talented craftspeople in order to preserve traditional skills – to study basketry that she has recently received. “It was such a ‘vision board’ thing but I held off applying for the last two years. Then I did a residency at Atlas Arts [a visual arts organisation on the Isle of Skye] and became very interested as part of the residency. There was a basketry meet-up on the Isle and it was a ‘eureka’ moment. It just felt so right. That night, with just three weeks to go until the deadline, I applied.” Now she will go on to study this skill with five weavers across the UK.

Traditional crafts are part of Hendry’s DNA. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, she was often to be found in her father’s workshop lending a helping hand. “Dad made all our furniture,” she explains. “There were no shops nearby so making things was easier than getting it delivered.” A lack of a local Ikea certainly proved to be a help rather than a hinderance despite Hendry’s ambivalence as to where this would all lead. She even took a year’s course in traditional clinker-boat building while still at school, just for the sheer love of it. “I never thought I’d do anything with any of this,” she says, still sounding somewhat surprised as to where her life has taken her.

However, it was going to Glasgow School of Art where things started to solidify, particularly when Hendry’s class were assigned their leather project. “At Glasgow, if you studied textiles, it was either focussed on fashion or interiors,” she says. “I flirted with both ideas, but mostly fashion.” Hendry’s signature style of intricately woven leather, either incorporated into handbag designs or coating steam-bent wood for her curved, free-standing storage units, was made on the day her class were allowed to choose their leather. The materials were supplied to the School by Aston Martin and Jaguar as a way of repurposing offcuts from their car interiors. “The offcuts were huge, with these tiny shapes cut out of them,” remembers Hendry. “There was a stampede for the largest pieces but there were also these slivers piled up, small in size yet huge in quantity. I set myself a brief to use them. I reweaved them, stitched them together. I loved the intricacy of them and how they made the leather into something delicate.”

After School, taking this delicate leather and turning it into a business reality was far from straight forward. The Aston Martin/Jaguar project with its focus on turning trash into treasure, as well as her respect for traditional craftsmanship, meant that sourcing suppliers who were small family-run concerns and as close to home as possible was difficult. “I graduated in 2016 and spent until 2020 sourcing,” Hendry says. “It was such a long process because there is no fast track.” Her years of research has translated into an impressive roster of suppliers. The leather is vegetable tanned, strictly a by-product of the meat industry, and currently sourced in Scandinavia and tanned in Tuscany by a family-owned business, though Hendry plans to use UK-based suppliers who work to regenerative farming practices. The cotton is woven in Scotland by a company founded in 1900 and uses looms over 100 years old. Even the zips have provenance and are sourced from Switzerland by a company founded in 1936 who patented the first-ever die-cast zipper on nylon.

Interestingly for someone so concerned about their environmental impact, the word “sustainable” is not part of Hendry’s lexicon. “I feel like it’s a word that isn’t quantifiable,” she says. “It can come across as greenwashing and doesn’t tell me anything.” She prefers, instead, to talk about zero waste and how she is naturally constrained by the fact that she doesn’t order in large quantities, so everything is used. In a world where luxury brands constantly use powerful words casually, it is refreshing to see someone so thoughtful about their work; something that is reflected in the quiet beauty of what she creates.

What creations will come out of Hendry’s new adventures in basketry is still nascent. Hendry wants these skills to lead to something that is a continuation of her current designs, though not entirely separate. She’s thinking big baskets, maybe using leather. Either way, they will, no doubt, be as beautiful and mysterious as the landscapes in which they were made.

CONTINUE READING

Unleash your inner sport-chic with effortless elegance. Diamond earrings, layered bracelets and stacked necklaces redefine casual style.

Dare to dazzle with ROX Adore radiant diamonds that mirror the energy of Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival.

Step out on Castle Street with Edinburgh Castle as your backdrop, showcasing oversized tailoring and stacked diamonds.