Iceland review - 2019, Qupperneq 76

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Iceland Review
Following the winding outskirts of Reykjavík, a
gravel road jostles you toward a wooden hut. The
strong scent of herbs emanates from the doorway.
Before you can enter into the warm space, Tryggur,
a charmingly fluffy Labrador-collie mix, sidles
up to you in shy greeting. He leads you in and sits
down patiently amongst a colourful collection of
yarns, waiting for a pat while his owner talks over
the sound of gently bubbling pots. “Tryggur means
faithful,” Guðrún acknowledges. “He is loyal to me
unless someone has food, in which case he pretends
not to know me.”
The story behind Iceland’s vibrant wool tra-
verses not just history, but that of national and
personal identity. For Guðrún Bjarnadóttir, the
tradition of obtaining colours from nature and the
process of wool dyeing encompass not only her
grandmother’s knowledge of plants and her moth-
er’s love for sewing, but also Iceland’s journey from
being a monochrome land, its palette of frosted
snow against a charcoal earth, to a vivid kaleido-
scope sewn into the fabric of what it means to be an
Icelander.
A vivid discovery
As a recent university graduate, Guðrún wanted
to find an exciting angle for her educational walks
while she worked as a nature warden in Mývatn,
monitoring wildlife and managing the land. This
is how the young ethnobotanist found herself
immersed in the world of legends and plants,
suddenly combining her passions for nature and
exploring the past. Many years onward, her goal is
bringing awareness to ecological plant use and its
rich history for both visitors and locals alike.
The inception of the core ideas underlying
Hespuhúsið, the studio where Guðrún presents
the history of wool dyeing, began in her childhood.
“My grandmother was the one who taught me to
identify plants at a young age,” she recalls. “When
I started working as a nature warden, I was asked
to take people along on educational walks. I could
recite the Latin name of all the plants, but I knew
that would just bore visitors to death. I wanted to
talk about something interesting, like folklore, or
how the plants were used, to increase interest and
to help people remember the plants.”
Her work with plants and their history set the
stage for Guðrún’s master’s thesis, which com-
pared plant use in Iceland to that of Norway and
the British Isles. “I wanted to find out if we brought
our knowledge with us from previous settlements,
or whether we figured it out in our new home in
Iceland,” she explains.
While writing her thesis, Guðrún came across
information on traditional dyeing processes and
began experimenting with plants as a part of her
research. “I thought it was very interesting and I
completely lost control of my experiments,” she
laughs as seven different cauldrons of various
shapes and sizes, stained with prismatic colours,
gently simmer around her. One of her pots, filled
with pinecones from her neighbour’s yard, fills the
room with a balmy Christmas scent. A delicate
spinning wheel sits in the corner, to be used on
occasions when Guðrún has ample time to show her
visitors how to spin the yarn.
Yellow, green and brown
When you cross the threshold of Guðrún’s work-
shop, a strong, sweetly acid scent catches you off
guard. There are handmade baby blankets and
shawls draped across the wooden table, and a rain-
bow of yarn trailing around the wooden shelves.
“My mother was a sewing teacher, so I was born
knitting, crocheting, making quilts, and this just
combines everything,” she says while stirring a con-
coction of plants and yarn with a wooden spoon.
The secret behind dyeing wool using plants lies
in the chemistry. “To this day, we use the same
chemistry, the same plants, and mostly the same
methods, except that I have some modern help
with the use of electricity. And when I say chem-
istry, I mean that colouring with plants is simply
chemistry. You want something acidic to hold the
colour, and you want something alkaline to change
the colour. In the old days, we worked with acidic
plants that gave us strong, long-lasting colours.
For something alkaline, we used urine – any urine
we could get. I stay away from the urine and use
cleaning ammonia instead. It’s easy to get, cheap,
and doesn’t smell as bad as urine.” Once you dye
the wool, the smell of urine does not go away until
the colour itself fades.
To this day, we use the same chemistry, the
same plants, and mostly the same methods,
except that I have some modern help with
the use of electricity.