About Highland Magic Fibre Arts
The maker
Textile practitioner, spinner, natural dyer, and weaver, working from Crieff, Perthshire, in the Scottish Highlands.
An unexpected path
I'm Samantha Farmer. I came to fibre through an unexpected path. I trained as a classical cellist, earning a Bachelor's from Western Washington University and a Master's from DePaul University in Chicago. When a chronic connective tissue condition ended my performing career, I found myself searching for a new way to work with my hands — something that carried the same depth of discipline, the same attention to material and resonance.
Hand-processed Ryeland yarn from Glen Urquhart.
How it began
I moved from Seattle to Scotland in 2020, and it was here that I discovered what wool could really be — not a commodity, but a living material shaped by land, breed, and season. A gifted practitioner in Inverness-shire taught me to source fleece directly from Highland flocks, to dye with plants foraged from the landscape, and to understand fibre not as a supply but as a relationship. That training changed everything about how I work.
The practice
Highland Magic Fibre Arts is built on traceability. I source fleece from specific flocks in the Scottish Highlands: sheep I can name, from farms I can visit. The wool is washed, processed, and spun at small Scottish mills, then returned to my studio where I blend, dye, and finish each batch by hand.
My natural dye palette comes from the land itself: lichen, heather, birch, indigo, and other botanical sources that produce colours rooted in this particular place. Every skein carries the character of its origin — the texture of a Highland fleece, the soft warmth of Scottish-reared alpaca, the quiet variation that only natural colour can give.
I also design patterns that are made to work with these yarns: simple, considered structures that let the fibre speak.
Out foraging for dye mushrooms and wind-blown lichen.
What I'm building
My practice is expanding into larger-scale woven and embroidered work — tapestry weaving and Jacobean-influenced embroidery on self-woven twill grounds, in dialogue with Scotland's rich tradition of decorative textile art. I'm currently constructing a scaffold pole loom for six-foot woven compositions with inset embroidered panels.
This is slow work, made by hand, rooted in place. Every skein, every batt, every woven piece begins with a real fleece from a real flock, and carries that origin all the way through to the finished object.