It was a privilege to be interviewed by the lovely Jane Moncrieff about my life and career as a jeweller so far. A huge thank you to Jane and everybody at BBC Radio Shetland. As those who know me know - I love a chat, and Jane did a great job of editing our interview down to sixty minutes! Click the image below to listen (there’s a transcript below in case you don’t understand our accents!)

Transcript of the first 15 minutes

Jane: 

Welcome back to BBC Radio Shetland and what used to be 50 minutes now 60, with me, Jane Moncrieff. My guest tonight is jeweller Karlin Anderson. 

She spent most of her working life in Glasgow and London, but has recently returned to Shetland and set up her workshop down at Hoswick. 

So I went down there to find out more about her life and work, starting with her childhood. 

Karlin: 

I grew up in Tingwall on South Setter Farm, so just next to the Tingwall loch. My mam's family has been there for generations. It's a dairy farm so yeah I grew up with cows and sheep. Granny and Grandad were on the farm and my auntie and uncle who now run the farm so it was really idyllic I suppose, just in the beautiful Tingwall valley surrounded by family and animals and lots of space to run and be free. 

Jane: 

Where about are you in the family? Because there's quite a few of you.  

Karlin: 

Yes there is! So I'm one of five.  Laura is 2 years older as me. And then there's me. And then there's Marie. She's two years younger than me and then Brian is 2 years below that, and then Lisa is 8 years below that. So there's five of us in total. There's now partners and bairns. And so I think when we get together just our immediate family, I think there’s 19 now?! 

Jane: 

You’re a tribe now! 

Karlin: 

Yeah, and as a wider family we’re a tribe because Mam was one of seven - Rosemary and Jim Irvine had 7 bairns. I think “Ower By” Granny had, ooh, I'm not going to get this right now, it's something like 26 grand bairns so we sometimes get together between Christmas and New Year and we hire the Tingwall Hall because there just too many of us now! 

Jane: 

Too much to put on one person! 

And what about your education, Karlin? 

Karlin: 

Yeah, so I just went to Scalloway School. That was the closest. It was perfectly good education, I was there from Primary 1 to Secondary 4. And then went into the Anderson [High School] for one year and then I left and went and worked at Hjaltasteyn [Jewellery]. I didn't go straight on to uni or college or anything. I think nobody around us had done that. The idea of going away to study was something that didn't seem like it was something for me. 

So I presumed that when I left school I would just get a job and that would be that. 

Jane: 

What drew you to Hjaltasteyn? 

Karlin: 

Well my Auntie Angela, she was there for years. 

And when I was just a peeire lass, then Angela was still at home at Granny and Grandad’s. So this before she got married. So both Angela and Irene were just like big sisters to me, so loved spending time with them. We'd play football and yeah, just get a chance to hang out a fair bit. And she was working at Hjaltasteyn, and they did a lot of the cutting and polishing stones, and a bit of jewellery as well. So Angela made her wedding ring and she did get to make a bit of jewellery. 

I was creative at school and really enjoyed making stuff in art, but I mind Granny saying to me, well, “you'll never make money painting pictures” I thought, well, that's probably true! I didn’t know how you would make money. I know, of course folk do. 

But I kind of fancied that, at school we got to do work experience and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew, growing up on a farm, I didn't want to be a farmer. I didn't want to be a nurse and I didn't want to be a secretary, but I didn't know what other jobs there were or what I would maybe do. But with work experience, you've got this kind of booklet and you could look through what you might want to. And one of the places was Hjaltasteyn and because Angela had been there. Yeah, I kind of thought I would quite like that, that kinda seemed like a good thing to go and have a go at so that was what I did. 

I had a week with Rosiland Thompson at Hjaltasteyn and absolutely loved it. Mam always still says that I came back for that and just said I would love to do that as a job, but I suppose never really imagined I actually would. But I loved seeing Rosalind working away. She was doing her thing, making jewellery and that was quite inspirational I would say 

Jane: 

And then a job come up, did it, once you’d left the school? 

Karlin: 

Yeah, well I was leaving school and I thought, well, I’ll ask if she would give me a job and she did! 

Jane: 

Initiative! 

Karlin: 

Yeah, well I thought I’ll just see what she says. I suppose because the tourism, I mean the buses were coming even then and she had buses during the summertime. And so it was busier in the summer, and so she had said she would take me on for the summer. But then the winter months it was harder for her to keep something on. So I went and worked with her for the summer and absolutely loved it and it gave me a chance just to kind of get a feel for what this would be like. And then when it was coming towards the end of the summer - that must have been around September time because she was saying that she wouldn't be able to keep me on, but I should maybe try Shetland Jewellery. 

So, I did that. I phoned them up and asked if they would give me a job and I don’t think they were looking for anybody at that time, but I was able to say to them well, “I can solder and I can do this and I can do that.” 

I remember Jim Moncrieff saying “Oh well, come over and see us and we can have a look at you and you can have a look at us and we’ll take it from there” So I they seemed happy enough and I was happy enough. So then I got a job there. 

Jane: 

So you’ve always been a self-starter I think 

Karlin: 

Yes. Even when I had my Saturday job at Smiths I went in and said ‘will you give me a job”, so yeah! 

Jane: 

So, you went to Shetland jewellery. How were you there? 

Karlin: 

It was about two years because I remember it being the 10th of October 94 and then I left for college in 96. So, it was pretty much two years I was there and got to learn a lot about making jewellery and they've got a brilliant set up there with a lovely big workshop and several people there. I mean, there was Jim Moncrieff and Alan Georgeson I think forget his surname and but Alan and Bruce Irvine. And so there was people who had been doing it for a long time. And so I was able to learn for them and a lot of other people in cleaning up castings and stuff and so they do everything from making masters.. casting it all on the premises. So that was a really good opportunity to get handle on what it was to be a jeweller I suppose. 

Jane: 

And did that really make your mind up that was the career for you? 

Karlin: 

Yes it did. Yeah, I kind of thought. Yeah, I really loved it. 

I remember one of my cousins, Lynn Anderson, and she was getting married him and asked if I would do their bridal jewellery and just really enjoy that challenge of designing something for them and then delivering the finished product. And yeah I just really enjoyed the whole thing so I was thinking this is what I wanted to do, but then kinda imagined there was a lot more that I could be learning about this and I really felt like that was something that I wanted to do. 

I wanted to be able to learn different aspects of the industry and try and broaden my knowledge, I suppose, and that meant going South to college or uni and so that was a bit of a thought, but yeah, comes September 96. I'd applied for a college position in Glasgow and it was a Jewellery Design, Manufacturing and Business Management course. So I set off for Glasgow in 96 to do that. Actually, it was a three-year course, but I skipped the first year and because the first year was more real basic NC level. But because that experience I had, I was able to skip the first year and go in at the HNC so that was pretty good.  

Yeah, set off to Glasgow with no idea. I think I'd been away once myself like me and Donna when we were at school, we finished our exams and we went to Aberdeen for a day but came back on the boat that night. So I didn't really know! 

Jane: 

Did you get a rude awakening? 

Karlin: 

A peerie bit, yes! Most of the time I had no idea where I was going. 

I remember my younger sister, Marie came with me and then got to the flat and it was in Scotstoun in sort of far West - not the West End but further out and even getting on the bus, we didn’t know where we were going, we had no idea and asked the bus driver how much it was to go “in-ower” and of course he didn’t know what “in-ower” was, and he didn’t know of any names of “in-ower”. So yeah, didn’t really know much about where I was or where to go, but yeah it was bit of a learning curve, but it was a really good one. 

It was lovely to be in a college environment, learning something that by that point I was passionate about and feeling like this was a really exciting thing to be involved in. The word sprang to mind, or the phrase, “coming of age”. I suppose I felt like I was. I was 19 at this point. I was now living in Glasgow and I'm studying something that I loved. And yeah, it was an exciting time 

I had done and two years at this college and then I was thinking about what I was going to do after that. One of the options would have been art school, which I had kind of thought would have been a good thing to do, but part-time while I was studying, I was working again. So, I had gotten work experience in a jewellers in the south in the Glasgow there are lovely company, Hodgkinson's and they have a really beautiful showroom and workshop and so we were able to make pieces for clients and for the showroom and it was a lovely environment to be in again. 

There's an older guy that had been doing jewellery all life and a couple other people there that had been doing it for a while so it was a good environment to be in. So when I finished, they asked if I would come and work full time. Yeah, I've never really felt like so much like a studier, I’m more of a worker, and I thought actually, this is what you're working towards. 

So and I started working there full-time, but through them they were very keen to sort of keep training their staff up, which was brilliant. So as part of my job there I got to do lots of short courses down in Birmingham. 

I'd of course never been to Birmingham before, but there's the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter. In the UK, I suppose there's two main jewellery quarters and that's the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter and then Hatton Garden in London. And it's just an amazing place. Again, so exciting to go there because it's just an area dedicated to jewellery so there's workshops, there's tool shops, there’s gemstone shops. And then there's a jewellery school in Birmingham and it's it’s such an amazing environment to be a part of. 

So I'd be going doing for kind of a week at a time and getting to train with folk there that were, yeah, the top of their game kind of thing and it was a really exciting time as well because it's amazing to see a whole area dedicated to jewellery and all different aspects. So got to learn the different aspects of the trade pretty well. 

Jane: 

I'm just curious to know that as a peerie lass were you somebody that draped yourself in jewellery at all? 

Karlin: 

Oh no! No, not really at all, actually. I loved making and stuff and Mam would say I was always very detailed so I loved drawing and Mam would tell her story when I was a peerie lass at play school and we were drawing and I was drawing a truck.. on the wheels I had to draw even the nuts on the wheels and folk would ask what that was.. well that was the nuts, obviously! So, I think I was always very detailed and. 

Whenever I was drawing anything, I'd maybe take a bit too long doing it, but I wanted to get all the detail in it. So I definitely didn't drape myself with jewellery growing up on a farm. There was not much need for that. 

And I'm a bit tomboyish as well, so it's no something... like when I first started in jewellery I kind of thought that diamonds were overrated because that whole sorta sparkly Princess thing.. well that just wasn't me. 

Jane: 

Not your best friend! 

Karlin: 

I mean they are now! But I've definitely changed my opinion on that. Still not much of a Princess, but diamonds are beautiful, but when you get to appreciate the different properties of diamond and the different colours and the cuts. And they're not just white sparkly. There are all different things like some of the pieces that are my favourite have black diamonds or brown diamonds, and so yeah, I've kind of developed over the years with that.