How did I get into weaving?” says James Donald with a guffaw. “I’ve no idea because I hated it at art school.”

When we think of weavers — if we do at all — we tend to think of craggy old men and women stooped over looms working their dexterous fingers to the bone. Donald, however, a spry chap in his early forties, could bang on about the wonders of warp and weft (the two types of thread used in weaving) for hours.

“I knew the technical processes but it wasn’t until after college, when I did some workshops with Japanese weavers in Australia, that I started to get excited about complicated weave structures,” he says. “It wasn’t just about flat cloth any more, it could be three-dimensional and sculptural.”

When Craft Scotland came to select designers for its C Word campaign, Donald’s contemporary take on weaving, a skill steeped in tradition, was a no-brainer.

He produces gorgeously detailed fabrics that are used for scarves, throws and the kind of dazzling pieces that arty people hang on their walls. All his works are hand-woven on a 32-shaft computerised Louet Megado 130 loom.

Donald largely uses yarns from Scottish-based manufacturers, mercerised cotton, dip-dyed silk linen and lambswool. The complex nature of the weave structures means the fabrics cannot be mass-produced commercially, so he produces just one collection a year.

“I’ve been weaving on the Louet loom for about 10 years and I get more and more passionate about it every year,” he says. “It allows me to do very complicated and technical structures that involve lots of layers and floats on the warp and the weft. Things are three-dimensional and textural.

“It’s not like Harris tweed of flat woven cloth — though I can do that. Even other weavers look at my work and say, ‘How the hell did you do that?’. But once you get beyond the technical aspects, it’s a case of using fairly simple weave structures.”

It sounds complicated but Donald is happy to share his secrets — he teaches weaving at Duncan of Jordanstone College, where he graduated in 1993.

Based in Edinburgh, where he co-owns Concrete Wardrobe, the hip Broughton Street design shop, he has just received a creative development award from the Scottish Arts Council to travel to Shetland to research and develop new techniques. Somehow he also finds the time to run his own design business, Pick One.

“I’m working seven days a week but it’s a really exciting time for me, as well as for the wider craft sector. Even a year ago, I would never have thought that Scottish crafts could have been presented in this way.”

For more on James Donald’s work visit www.craftscotland.org

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