Island

My travel agent mother planned our annual knitting field trip in June and this year we ventured forth to Iceland. Thankfully recent volcanic activity did not affect our travel or plans. This picture of The Sun Voyager sculpture in Reykjavik is one of my favorites from the trip. After arriving early at Keflavik Airport, we caught our FlyBus to our hotel. The hotel was in fact 15 apartments that occupied a single floor of an office building and therefore did not have 24 hour staff in house. We arrived and waited about 30 minutes until reception arrived and then were pleasantly surprised that our room was ready. Had it not, we'd planned on storing our luggage in the laundry room and heading out to see the city. It was much nicer to sit for a minute in the room and have a cup of coffee and take a good look at a map. We quickly found the bus stop down the street and were off.

We got on at our Hatun stop and rode around on bus #15 to get a lay of the land and just to see how the buses operate. It costs around $3.50 for one bus ride (drivers do not give change) or $7 for a day pass which must be purchased at a station. We got off at Hlemmur which was the big hub and proceeded to walk up Laugavegur where we immediately spotted real-live knitting graffiti! We later learned this was outside the office of Knitting Iceland. They'd set baskets of knitting out in the community for anyone to work on at their leisure and construct the graffiti with the pieces.

Storkurinn is located at Laugavegur #59 on the second floor of a little mini mall.

This was a fabulous yarn and fabric shop but can you believe I didn't get any of either here? They carried Kaffe Fassett and Amy Butler fabrics as well as an awesome selection of designer yarns, Lopi in different weights, several Danish brands, a great selection of tools and needles and a huge inventory of knitting books.
They stocked what we know as Harmony Wood needles as they are marketed in Europe under the brand Knit Pro. This shop also had the best prices for Lopi that we'd seen but their color selection was kind of limited. We saw balls of Lett Lopi in sweater shops in limited colors for almost twice the price. They also sold the unspun Plotulopi by the plate and not by weight. I bought a beautiful shell shaped needle gauge in this shop. I would totally patronize a shop like this on a car field trip, but I didn't get any fabric or yarn here because much of it I could get in the States.


We'd booked a knitting tour through Knitting Iceland and had a few options as far as what we could do or see. Our guide Binga picked us up at our hotel and drove us out to the Alafoss mill and shop. The mill is on the right and the shop is the pale yellow building on the left. The little bridge goes over the stream that is still used by the mill.


This is Mother with Binga and one of the shopkeepers. She was looking for a pattern for a particular style of jumper and they were helping her look through their inventory of Lopi books for something suitable and discussing how she could alter it. They had all weights of Lopi as well as a few different wool lines, some sock yarn and a few novelty yarns.

Lett Lopi was about $2.70/ball, Einband was about $3/ball, and the Alafoss Lopi was about $4.60/ball. Plotulopi plates were sold at about $30.50/kilo. We saw ladies coming in and buying stacks and stacks of those plates and they'd throw it on the scale and then cart it out in big tote bags.

You can see the "plates" of the Plotulopi behind Mother. All the colors coordinated across the weights. Amazing.


They also had piles and piles of hand knit sweaters. Iceland is known for the Lopapeysa yoked sweater. They're everywhere and you see them actually worn everywhere too. They also had fur items, decorative items, glassware, jewelery, candles, felted soaps, gift items, etc. While we were there, a busload of tourists pulled up and and overran the store.
Here I am clutching my stash outside the mill! I was so excited to run around loose in there!

Binga then drove us to the farm of Rita and Pal. These two were absolute magicians. They made beautifully smoothed and polished buttons, boxes, needles and jewelery out of horn, antler, and bone. They also made felted slippers with angora lining and seal skin soles. She showed us around their farm and took us out to the workshop to show us some of the materials. They braid horse hair to make their necklaces and most of their materials are obtained from the slaughterhouse.

I bought some bone and antler buttons, a horn darning needle, an absolutely stunning antler box, and Rita gave us each a boiled curly sheep horn. She explained that they boiled the horns and they had to dry for over a year or else the finished item would warp. She showed us lengths of horse hair, carefully packed angora fiber, and even yarn spun from dog hair. They keep a year's worth of wool in their workshop in case the next year's wool is poor quality. I didn't feel so bad about my own stash after hearing that! She also showed us her greenhouses and birch trees and geese.

Binga drove us onward to the home of Gudrun who is a botany teacher at the agricultural school and a natural hand dyer. She welcomed us into her kitchen with coffee and brought out one dye pot after another: one with rhubarb root, one with onion skins, one with lupins, one with birch leaves just to name a few. She demonstrated the color changes when dye is fixed with ammonia as a mordant. This can be done the old fashioned way with urine--and she did tell us that she does sometimes use cow urine obtained from the agricultural school--or you can use household cleaner. I had never seen yarn dyed in person before and it was a fascinating presentation.


She had yarn in every stage and showed us the entire process.

And then she showed us to her living room where this awaited us on a table. She dyes the Istex Einband yarn and sells it at a coop located at the agricultural school.



At Alafoss I'd bought a pattern book at that uses only this weight of yarn and bought 8 skeins from Gudrun. Choosing colors was agonizing because there were so many I wanted.

Gudrun then took us to the coop's shop at the school. She explained that it was a very structured coop with standards as to quality of the work and finished items, how they are presented and displayed, and all members had to be voted in.

They had hand knit lopapeysa sweaters with motifs unique to the area and the patterns were closely guarded. She explained the patterns were locked in a safe and when coop knitters checked the pattern out, they'd sign something saying they wouldn't copy the pattern in any way and then return the original pattern when done.

And more of Gudrun's beautiful yarn. They had hand knit sweaters from hand spun yarn, they had card woven bands, felted slippers, buttons and jewelery from Rita and Pal, Lopi books and yarns, etc.


We enjoyed the National Museum which is one stop past Radhuset on bus line #14. There is also a fabulous open air museum which is Laxakvisl stop on bus line #19. This is the loft of a farm house. I could just live up there.


We got to see a few national dresses and some of the knitted slippers. I love national costumes of all kinds but I did not like the head coverings of these. The one looks almost like a horn emerging from a turban. We couldn't figure out how it was supported and I can't imagine wearing it. The other tasseled hat reminds me of Greek army uniforms. The details and fabrics and embroidery and silver of the garments were beautiful however.

We rented a car for 2 days and drove The Golden Circle and stopped off first at Thingvellir. Dad had been here a few years before and just raved about how truly awesome it is. This is the view from the pay toilets on site. The landmark is free admission but it cost almost $2 to use the bathroom and it was worth it for the view alone.

Dad has said before that it looks like the setting of The Lord Of The Rings and Mom kept saying the landscape looks like nothing you've ever seen before. There were areas like this with fossilized lava flow and wide crevasses and cracks of all sizes everywhere. You are allowed to walk around on it but you really have to watch your step because of the cracks and much of this stony surface is entirely covered in spongy moss. There is a built up wooden observation sidewalk. I would not have been surprised at all to see elves climbing out from the moss.

You can literally walk down a chasm the where the sea floor burst. The site is significant not only geologically but also historically because Icelanders started meeting here as a national parliament in 930. Unbelievable.

We continued on to see the geysers which were just amazing. This is Strokkur which irregularly erupted every couple of minutes. There were other pools and hot pots and streams of loudly bubbling boiling water. It was in the low 50's when we were there and it felt so good to stand in the warm steam. The water and steam always smelled like sulfur, not overpoweringly so, but my silver rings would tarnish in the shower.

We continued on to Gullfoss and hiked to the waterfall. Wow. The waterfall is a staircase of 3 steps and the spray just danced on the air. These three landmarks were the busiest attractions our entire trip.

The following day we drove to Vik to go to the woolen mill. Dad brought me a fleece from Vik Wool when they were still in Reykjavik. We drove all the way out there and it was one of the times Garmin was truly sassing us because she kept trying to take us out to the middle of nowhere. We did eventually find it. Most of what they do there is machine knit but you did get to see the work floor.

I did get these machine knit mittens with fleece lined cuffs on sale (TILBUD!) for almost $15 and a little tree ornament of wool carders.

In Vik there is a unique stone formation of 3 stones that legend says is 3 trolls who were caught off guard by the rising sun while trying to drag a boat to shore. We really wanted to see the beach which is made of black volcanic sand but we were pressed for time and walking out there just wasn't an option. We were afraid to drive the rental car because the road to the beach was a treacherous rocky road so instead we took lots of pictures and headed back. These purple flowers are lupins and they just grew everywhere in huge fields like this.

We were saying that for what we did that day in Vik, it wasn't worth the trip. If we'd had all day to be there and get out to that beach and spend time at Vik Wool, it would have been worth it. I took advantage of the situation and had myself an Icelandic hotdog. My brother in law warned me about these because they are delicious. We saw lots and lots of backpackers in Vik and saw the Hostelling International hostel while driving around looking for Vik Wool.

Don't get me wrong though. We still enjoyed the ride in the car and had small adventures like sheep crossing the road or putting gas in the car. We even survived a detour after we discovered the road to Geysir was closed. The closer we got to dairy country, the greener it got and we saw all kinds of waterfalls. The mountains we drove through were incredible and to see these farms built at their feet. It very much reminded us of Norway. We saw countless horse rental places along the drive and one farm we passed had a lopapeysa sweater hanging from the sign at the end of their lane. Apparently that is the international symbol for "Knitting Sold Here".

We stopped at this lovely shop at Pingborg outside of Selfoss. This was our source of time constraint as it turns out. We'd made an appointment with the shop lady to be there in the afternoon but before 1600 when she closed. That means we had to rush to get to Vik and do our things there and then rush back to Pingborg. The shopkeeper was going to be out of town until afternoon so we had to do it the way we did.

This shop focused not only on hand dyed but also hand spun yarn and it was wonderful in there. They had a wall of hand spun skeins hanging as you came in and I wonder how many people take pictures of it when they arrive? They had a huge picker and they sold picked and carded and dyed wool for spinning. They had yoke sweaters with the pattern knit with variegated hand dyed yarns and their own unspun lopi. I loved how every single item was delightfully one of a kind because of the hand made element.

While we were in there, a group came in and looked around and left and we'd seen them at all 3 geological sites the day before. Rita and Pal had items for sale here too. Mother found a pair of feather and fan lace fingerless mitts.

I got a bag of cleaned but uncarded gray Icelandic wool for spinning, 2 paper wrapped packages of brown Icelandic wool processed into sliver form. The skeins of yarn are gray hand spun that has been overdyed for a beautiful heathered effect and the 3 balls are hand spun and hand dyed. There was also a darling napping dog in this shop!

On the way home on both days, we stopped in Hveragerdi which was a small town on the way with a gas station and a Bonus grocery store on the edge of town. We stopped there both days to get gas, go to the grocery store, buy rolls from the little bakery there, and they also have public restrooms in this building. There was also a little ice cream shop that also sold hot dogs...so I had one each day that we stopped. And did I mention there was a yarn shop in this building too?

Just an awesome well stocked and clearly catering yarn shop. She had embroidery floss, wool, and perle cotton. She had acrylic yarns, blends, novelty yarns and of course a good selection of Lopi in different weights. She also had ribbons, beads, tools, and finishing items. I got a lovely tweedy brown ball of sock yarn. I have to say too that language has never been a problem the entire trip. Almost everyone speaks excellent English and Danish is taught as a second language.

We had to go back to The Handknitter's Association in Reykjavik to take pictures and make our final desperate last chance yarn purchases. There were 2 locations but this is the one at #19 Skolavodustigur. You would encounter the other one first on your walk up Laugevegur and it was a small shop full of machine knit things and souvenir and knick knack type things so we were kind of disappointed. By the time we walked up the street and found this one, we were a little disappointed to walk in and find basically the same thing...

...until you walk to the back of the store and look into this adjoining portion. I swear it was like Narnia in there. You walk in and they had stacks of knitting sorted into all sizes and cardigans and pullovers and jumpers and coats and lace and etc. They also sold all weights of Lopi for the 2nd best price we'd seen anywhere, zippers of all sizes and styles, buttons, books and patterns.
Mom found a jumper with a motif she liked and asked the shopkeeper if she knew where she could find this pattern and she said most of the member knitters just make up their motifs as they go. We took close up pictures of the jumpers she liked and she will have to devise her own patterns.

I had to take a picture of the trinkets I got this year. I got a polish pottery creamer for my collection. Iceland is big on runes and I got a few fobs and a stone rune set. The small pair of shoes are made of fish skin and was the traditional foot covering. I was hoping to fine some sort of working pattern or guide to make the shoe part. The carder ornaments are pictured here as well as the shell shaped needle gauge I described earlier. Mom and I each got a bone needle at the Saga exhibit and both brought home Lava Pearl earrings. My new tree ornaments were these cute wood burned pieces on striped ribbons that looked like the flag.

One of my favorite Iceland things I learned was laufabraud or leaf bread. This is made at Christmas and everyone sits at the table and decorates their own like we would make a gingerbread house or decorate cookies. Here is a video collage about laufabraud.

I absolutely loved Iceland and would go back in a heartbeat. The weather was wonderful and cool for our stay. It even snowed for a few moments on June 9th! I really enjoyed Iceland's knitting because it truly is different from other knitting we've seen. One we arrived we never had to change hotels or board trains with luggage and we were chauffeured to and from the airport in comfort courtesy of Dave!