Hello

My name is Heather Yule. I am a Scottish traditional storyteller and teacher/player of the traditional Scottish harp (clarsach). I am known as a performer who loves to weave together the spoken word with music.

All my life I have been captivated by imagery, illustration, graphic design, crafts of all kinds and the patterns and textures found in the natural world. Early influences of inpiration were from childrens' classic books that introduced me to the master illustrators such as Arthur Rackham, Wanda Gág, Tove Jannson, Pauline Baynes, Beatrix Potter, Quentin Blake and Dr. Suess, to name a few. I adored the stories penned by Hans Christian Anderson and was later delighted to discover his love of paper cutting. I was also aware of the magical sillhouette figures by Lotte Reiniger long before I learnt about her incredible pioneering work in animation. The use of shadow puppetry and papercuts in storytelling in certain Asian traditions I find very powerful and intriguing.

This website, and my craft work that I am offering here, is a celebration of this fascination combined with my passion for storytelling. Visualisation, as much as imagination, is a foundation for traditional storytelling. I have become curious and excited to see if I can weave craft and design with my storytelling as successfully as I do with my harp. I have begun with simple images and ideas inspired mainly by riddles but the question is .... where might this adventure take me?!

My Story

When I was just a wee lass my mother was a lecturer at Northwestern University in the United States. She taught Children’s Drama and Children’s Literature in the School of Speech. Therefore, I had access to the best children’s books with all their glorious illustrations. To make things even better, sometimes when mum was lecturing, she would leave me in the children’s book section of the university library to be looked after by a lovely team of librarians. What bliss to be surrounded by hundreds of books, and also supplied with a super-giant box of crayons and scrap paper.

My mother had already become very interested in traditional storytelling. Her close friends at the time, Gerry and George Armstrong, were both fine musicians and very knowledgable about Scottish and Appalachian traditional music and song. Gerry also knew a lot about traditional crafts. I especially remember her expertise in quilting. She taught me how to make

cornhusk dolls - dying the husks and then folding, wrapping and tying to create a doll.

The Armstrongs would have regular gatherings at their house - what we call here in Scotland ‘ceilidhs’ - and their home would fill with the sound of highland bagpipes, fiddles, guitars, Appalachian dulcimers, singing, and of course storytelling. Everyone would be expected to participate, from the youngest to the oldest. I might have regaled the company with a rendition of ‘Ally Bally Bee’ (Coulter’s Candy) on the recorder at some point, but it was during these sessions that I began telling stories. There is a family anecdote that my very first public performance was in front of one of my mother’s student classes when I was three years old. The story goes that I sat on a wee chair on top of a table and my chosen performance piece was the Three Little Bears. When I introduced the three bears I naturally gave each bear a different voice. The audience giggled in appreciation but then when Mama Bear shouted for Papa and Baby Bear to get up for breakfast and Papa Bear growled, "Do I have to get up?!" the giggles turned into gales of laughter. Offended I stood up, turned my chair round, and then sat back down with my back to the assembly and continued to tell the story to the very end.

My grandfather was an artist. He started his professional career in commercial art, and then later specialised in oil and watercolour. There were many things I loved about visiting my grandparents, but top on the list would be spending time in his studio. It was a place of wonder. So many sizes and shapes of paint brushes, the nib pens for ink drawing, the palettes with smears of colour, the perfectly sharpened pencils, rubber cement, the smell of oil paints… He had some wonderful books on how to draw caricatures and cartoon figures which I spent hours pouring over. My grandfather and I had many ‘rituals’ when I came to visit. One of them was making, and flying, paper airplanes. I remember this especially because we couldn’t just fold the airplanes and then fly them - oh no - they always needed to be decorated first.

My patient grandfather trying to give me a painting lesson...

It looks like I was enjoying myself but I doubt I paid the appropriate attention to his earnest instructions!

My mother transformed our dining room into an art studio for several years. I have never forgotten because it was so much fun with both of us painting and drawing and making a marvellous mess! I also remember at some point during these years trying to fashion dollhouse furniture from paper, but unfortunately notebook paper stuffed with tissues was not the ideal construction material...

When I was seven my mother began a PhD in folk narrative at the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh University. That was the start of a wonderful new chapter with the focus on traditional storytelling and folklore. During her fieldwork mum would often take me along with her when she went on recording trips. These included visiting the Gaelic tradition bearer Nan MacKinnon on the island of Vatersay in the Outer Hebrides and master storytellers from the Scottish Traveller tradition, such as Duncan Williamson, Betsy Whyte and Stanley Robertson. The Travelling people of Scotland are not only amazing storytellers, ballad singers and musicians but also master craftsmen. They were renown for their expertise at tin-smithing and pearl fishing and also easily put their hand to making many things like creels (woven baskets), heather besoms (brooms made using hazel and bundles of heather), wooden flowers and even clothes pegs to sell round the villages. My mother’s PhD evolved into a comparative study of the Jack Tales found amongst the Appalachian mountain-folk and the Scottish Travellers. These are two cultural groups on the edge of society, misunderstood and often treated as outcasts. Both of these communities have a deep understanding and respect of the land and nature, and treasure ancient knowledge and skills often forgotten by the modern world.

Music had continued to be woven into the fabric of day-to-day life. We went along to various folk festivals, attended different styles of concerts, and of course there were the regular ceilidhs in our tiny cottage, or at friends’. It was because of my father that I had the luck to start learning the harp when I was about twelve. My father had initially trained as a boat builder and then worked many years as a joiner, both in the building trade and independently. He wanted to branch out into something more intricate to fully utilise his woodworking skills and eventually decided to start making traditional Scottish harps. It was fascinating to be there to see the development of his first designs, the construction of the instruments and his process to becoming a professional harp maker.

My father is a perfectionist and is very skilled at adding beautiful details to his harps, especially inlays.

to include some carving, so spent a bit of time refining his woodcarving skills. The designs he then

mostly based on Celtic artwork. Celtic patterns are very beautiful and evocative of the rich traditions

legends. I have a beloved harp that he made for me with a carving of the Salmon of Knowledge, which

very important in both Ireland and Scotland.

He took a notion

created were

of Celtic myths and

is a myth that is

As a teenager I continued to experiment with various crafts. I really enjoyed working with clay and paper to make 3-dimensional structures, but also dabbled with skills like sewing. My absolute favourite pursuit at the time was calligraphy. There is something about the shapes of lettering that makes me happy, the graceful lines and curves, and the beautiful colours

of ink to play with. I delighted in exploring gouache paints, pigment powders and even worked a bit with gold leaf.

In my university days, and then in my professional life, I have continued to hone my skills as a musician, a teacher and a storyteller. Through experience and practise, I firmly believe that to be the most effective performer and communicator in both music and story you have to see the colours and images vividly in your mind's eye and feel the emotions of the narrative you are transmitting to your audience. The rich possibilities in all artforms is tantalising and I am also continuously entralled by the interplay that can occur between different art forms and how they can influence, interact and enrich each other.

The other wonderfully mysterious place in their house was the photographic darkroom in the basement. What a magical experience being in that space, with the illumination of that strange red light, watching a negative being transformed into a printed photograph; the pungent smell of the chemicals and the excitement and anticipation as the images gradually emerged …

How Papertales came to be : Storywalks

This venture has evolved from many elements, as ‘my story’ illustrates. Though I believe the most recent source of my inspiration and impetus has come through the Storywalk events that I developed for the Edinburgh International Harp Festival. Seven years ago the festival asked me to do a few Come & Try harp events for children, and they requested the inclusion of some storytelling to pad out the sessions. I decided that it would be far more fun, for both myself and the participants, to combine both elements. Therefore, the storytelling component became just one multi-layered story which transformed into a physical journey, an adventure, to find the stolen Enchanted Harps.

Every time I do a Storywalk the story changes to fit the physical spaces available where that particular event is taking place. Contant elements are the treasure hunts, visual clues which I create to fit the story, and riddles, which always play a vital role. Riddles are there to help lead us on the right path: ‘the more you take, the more you leave behind’. The footsteps might take us through a deep, dark