Introducing The Designer And Maker

Lynne McCallum Barr, who is from Culloden just outside Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, has grown up surrounded by the Harris Tweed tradition. Lynne’s mother is from the Isle of Lewis, where the family would spend every summer at home in Shawbost with Lynne’s grandparents. Lynne would spend most of her time in the loom shed with her grandfather, filling the bobbins ready for him to change them over and watching this fantastic tweed appear slowly before her eyes. Her grandfather made it look effortless as he worked the huge loom using only manpower alone for hours and hours every day.

Lynne’s uncles are also Harris Tweed weavers with their own looms, and so growing up with Harris Tweed has always been part of her life and is a tradition that she admires greatly. For Lynne there is no doubt that Harris Tweed sits deservingly on the list of great Scottish influences on the world today; as important as the invention of television and the telephone, and as instantly recognisable as Scotland’s great whisky industry.

Lynne’s ambition is to help keep this unique tradition alive and well in her own small way. Working from home designing and making her handbags, she currently lives just outside Edinburgh but is constantly reminded of her roots every time the next delivery of Tweed arrives. The warm and woolly smell always triggers memories and transports her back to the loom shed watching her grandfather and listening to the rhythmic ‘click-clack’ of the loom. Lynne hopes that BlackHouse Harris Tweed Handbags (a traditional type of Hebridean dwelling) can help bring you a little piece of Scotland in the form of these very feminine, individual and stylish Harris Tweed Handbags.