Iceland review - 2016, Page 83

ICELAND REVIEW 81
It was January 2015, and Hélène
Magnússon was standing in an indus-
trial building in Blönduós, North
Iceland, amid bags of the shorn fleeces
of thousands of Icelandic sheep. Wearing
boots and coveralls, Hélène sliced the
bags with a large knife, then reached in
to touch the fleece inside. If she felt fine,
airy lambswool, she would pull the bag
wide open and painstakingly separate
it from the thicker, denser adult sheep
wool—the initial step in the lengthy pro-
cess of developing Iceland’s first high-
end artisanal yarn line.
A chic, vivacious Parisian, Hélène never
exactly intended to become a yarn man-
ufacturer, a hand-knitting
pattern designer or a lead-
ing voice in modernizing
Icelandic knitting tradi-
tions. Yet there she stood
that day in Blönduós,
sifting through the prod-
uct of the November
shearing to glean the raw
materials for what would
become Gilitrutt; a fine
lace-weight yarn that is
both deliciously soft and
surprisingly sturdy. It’s a
long way from law school
in Paris, where she sat
through classes on busi-
ness and trial law, knit-
ting all the while. “All
the experiences I’ve had,
everything I’ve done, has
led me here,” Hélène says,
chuckling softly at the improbability of
it all.
Today, the former lawyer is essentially
reinventing Icelandic knitting from a
small studio on the second floor of her
carefully restored Reykjavík home. In
addition to inventing the concept of high-
end yarn from Icelandic wool, Hélène
designs patterns that update traditional
designs. Her lopapeysa, or Icelandic woo-
len sweater, for instance, has a flattering,
slightly body-conscious shape, and her
even more modern cardigan has clean
lines and a minimalist design.
“She has an eye on things that are pre-
cious, but that Icelanders didn’t see,” says
Sunneva Hafsteinsdóttir, a project man-
ager at Handverk og Hönnun (Crafts and
Design), a Reykjavík nonprofit organ-
ization dedicated to Icelandic crafts
and design. “We have an expression in
Iceland, ‘Glöggt er gests augað,’ or ‘per-
ceptive is the visitor’s eye.’ She sees some
treasures in our tradition that we did not
see.”
SOURCE OF HAPPINESS
The daughter of a naval officer, Hélène
grew up in France and elsewhere, and
learned to knit when she was just seven.
But her mother’s lessons didn’t take,
so two years later she re-taught herself
using a book she’d saved up to buy. She
began with ten stitches and
simply knitted back and
forth. “After a few meters,
I knew how to knit,” she
says.
She used those same ten
stitches to teach herself
to purl—a stitch made by
putting the needle through
the front of the stitch from
right to left—then to tack-
le each new technique she
encountered. Eventually,
Hélène found herself in
law school, and then work-
ing for a Paris law firm.
But the law had always
been a pragmatic, rather
than passionate, choice,
and Hélène decided it was
time for a big change: in
1995, she moved to Iceland
and worked as a mountain guide in
the summer and cook in the winter.
While this combination was certainly
better than drafting legal briefs, Hélène
couldn’t imagine spending the rest of her
life this way. “I started to think about
what I like, what brings me pleasure, and
the answer was knitting,” she says. “I’m
always happy when I knit; it always feels
good.”
That moment of clarity brought her to
the Iceland Academy of the Arts, where
she studied textiles and fashion. For her
final project, Hélène created a collection
based on knitted shoe inserts—colorful,
intricate wool accessories that Icelanders
tucked into their shoes on special occa-
sions as far back as the 17th century. She