Iceland review - 2016, Page 84

82 ICELAND REVIEW
immersed herself in history, uncovering
traditions that were largely unknown
even to Icelanders, then taking those
patterns and using them in new designs
she created for sweaters, hats, scarves and
mittens. “My aim was preserving the tra-
dition so it wouldn’t disappear—every-
one thinks the lopi sweater is all there
is when it comes to Icelandic knitting,”
she says.
By this time, Hélène had married.
When her husband was hired by the
European Fair Trade Association, the
young family moved to Luxembourg.
Hélène needed a job she could do any-
where, so she decided to focus on creat-
ing knitting patterns and offering tours
of Iceland that combine knitting and hik-
ing. She created a website and a brand for
herself—icelandicknitter.com—and, as if in
an instant, the threads of her experience
were woven into a career—and a calling.
CREATING SOMETHING UNIQUE
And then there was the yarn. A few years
ago, after the family had returned to
Iceland, Hélène came across a knitted
lace dress in an old magazine and wanted
to re-create it. But the only commercially
available lace-weight Icelandic yarn—
Ístex’s Einband—wasn’t fine enough to
produce the light, ethereal dress she
was aiming for. So with the same sin-
gle-minded passion with which nine-
year-old Hélène taught herself to knit,
adult Hélène poured herself into a series
of creative experiments. She knit the
dress in a variety of other fibers—silk,
Shetland wool, even paper—but she
remained unsatisfied: she wanted to knit
this very Icelandic dress with Icelandic
yarn.
And so Hélène Magnússon decided to
produce the yarn herself. The process
was fraught with challenges, including
the fact that the unique fibers produced
by Icelandic sheep are difficult to spin
as finely as she wanted. After a few
years of trial and error that included
the production of two separate yarns
that didn’t quite meet her specifications,
Hélène found herself in that building in
Blönduós, selecting lambswool by hand.
Eighteen months later, she finally held
skeins of Gilitrutt, carefully dyed in
colors inspired by the Icelandic land-
scape: the icy turquoise of glaciers, the
earthy green of moss, the light black of
local sheep.
Gilitrutt is already stocked at a handful
of shops in Iceland, and Hélène plans to
distribute it in Belgium, Paris, London,
Copenhagen, Canada and the US. Early
tests of that old dress pattern are prom-
ising. Meanwhile, Hélène is working
on new designs that show off Gilitrutt’s
softness and strength—and that continue
to tweak Iceland’s knitting traditions in
exciting ways. *
HANDICRAFTS
A COMMON LANGUAGE
A group of Icelandic knitters are standardizing the
language they use to describe their craft.
Knitting has boomed since the financial crisis, with many Icelanders taking
up the craft as a hobby (rather than a necessity as in days gone by). Along
the way, the vocabulary knitters use has shifted, with pattern designers and
book publishers introducing different ways of describing techniques and pat-
tern elements and sometimes just outright inventing new words to describe
existing terms. That phenomenon makes it difficult for knitters, according to
Guðrún Hannele Henttinen, who owns Storkurinn, a Reykjavík yarn shop. “It’s
very confusing when two people are talking about the same things and not
using the same words,” she says.
That’s why Guðrún and four other textile and handicraft experts have
formed a volunteer committee to standardize and preserve the Icelandic
knitting lexicon. Working as part of the Icelandic Word Bank project at the
University of Iceland, committee members are poring through old books and
magazines, looking for long-lost Icelandic terms that would be useful for to-
day’s knitters. Sometimes, they’re even inventing new Icelandic words to de-
scribe new techniques.
The group plans to publish the results of its work online and in a booklet
later this year.
Hélène’s Gilitrutt yarn is dyed in colors inspired by the Icelandic landscape.