For an unexpected way to experience Iceland, pack knitting needles

I spent my second day in Iceland in a hotel on the outskirts of Reykjavik, trying resolutely to knit. Gathered around a coffee table with me were Ragga Sjöfn Jóhannsdóttir, my instructor, and my friend Lindis Sloan, both experienced knitters who fluidly worked the yarn with barely a glance at their hands.
And then there was me, gripping the needles as I struggled to maintain the proper tension that would allow me to transform two skeins of local wool into something resembling a headband. My progress was excruciatingly slow, but a couple of hours in, a red ring of textile with pink diamonds was beginning to emerge.
Then Ragga noticed a mistake I had made in a previous row. Taking the needles, she began ripping out my hard-earned stitches. “If you can’t unravel,” she said with a jolly laugh, “you can’t knit.”
It was a counterintuitive way of spending a vacation in Iceland. Most people travel to the island nation for steamy soaks in the milky waters of the Blue Lagoon or nighttime treks to see the northern lights. But in a country with a deeply ingrained craft tradition, a climate conducive to sweaters, and as many sheep as people, knitting tourism is on the rise.
Hélène Magnusson is largely responsible for the development. Half-French, half-Icelandic, Magnussen is a pattern designer known for work that blends traditional Icelandic and modern styles. She also organizes tours that take a deep dive into Icelandic wool culture, including visits to sheep farms, spinning factories and dyeing studios. And because she is both a former hiking guide and a designer inspired by nature, her tours include an outdoor element like hiking or horse riding.
“Why would you come to Iceland and not move?” she said.
But at the core of the tours is the time set aside to sit somewhere cozy and knit. “Three or four hours a day together, knitting, you make some good friends,” Magnusson said.
A knitting paradise
Magnusson wasn’t offering tours when I was in Iceland, but she talked me through her itineraries so I could put together a DIY version. I invited Lindis, who is from Norway, another country that takes wool seriously.
Just how seriously Icelanders take it quickly became clear in Reykjavik, where at least one 24-hour grocery store stocks shelves of yarn for 2 a.m. knitting emergencies. A knit-goods paradise, the capital has plentiful yarn stores and outlets selling finished garments — from contemporary designers to secondhand stores where legions of ungrateful Icelanders consign the Christmas gifts their grandmothers have painstakingly crafted for them.
But the mecca for classic Icelandic sweaters is the Handknitting Association’s shop. With its floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with fuzzy cardigans and pullovers, it is the embodiment of options paralysis, so I was grateful when Marta Makuchowska, who works there, helped me navigate it.
Makuchowska, who is from Poland, moved to Iceland to go to university, and ended up not only writing her thesis on the knitters’ cooperatives, but learning to knit “lopepeysa” — the typical Icelandic sweater made from thick, unspun yarn called lopi and knit with an intricate circular pattern at the yoke. “It was a good way to fit into Icelandic culture,” she explained.
A true Icelandic sweater must be handmade, and cooperatives like the Handknitting Association act as a guarantor of quality. Founded in the 1970s to increase the bargaining power of women supplementing the family income, the association requires potential members to audition (with a sweater) and ensures that their work meets strict criteria: It must be made with wool from Icelandic sheep, conform to approved patterns, and be knit in Iceland.
Learning the craft
Based on Magnusson’s advice, Lindis and I devised a plan: Drive north along the coast to Blönduós, home to the country’s main wool-washing facility and its only textile museum, then cut inland and return south, where there are a handful of wool-related cottage industries.
First, however, I had to learn to knit.
Which is where Sjöfn Jóhannsdóttir came in. A retired schoolteacher, she holds four-day workshops for experienced knitters and shorter sessions for beginners. I was not a novice, but my technique is terrible, and I’m intimidated by anything more complicated than a purl stitch. I was counting on my Icelandic wool journey to help me overcome those obstacles.
Sjöfn Jóhannsdóttir had firm ideas about technique but a warm pedagogic style gleaned from decades of teaching math and crafts (Icelandic children learn to knit in school). Starting me on that headband, she showed me how to cast on stitches, and how to unite them on round needles so that, in the typical Icelandic style, the finished garment would have no seams.
I found the work painstaking, and it was difficult to imagine that I would ever achieve the grace with which both she and Lindis were rapidly assembling sweaters. But I managed to reknit a row or two before the end of the workshop, and after a restorative lunch of Icelandic smoothie bowls, I promised my teacher I would keep trying.
Going north
The following day, Lindis and I headed north. In Bogarnes, we stopped at Ljómalind, a cooperative where brightly colored sweaters shared shelf space with jars of rhubarb jam, earrings carved from ram horns and a freezer full of lamb parts.
Later, near the white clapboard church of Hvanneyri, we found the Ullarselid cooperative. Inside, Hugrún Jóhannsdóttir, an avid knitter and Viking re-enactor (with the Runic tattoos to prove it), explained that the cooperative had been founded in 1992 to teach wool-working at the agricultural school, and “to prize women’s work.”
Inside, sweaters are shelved depending on whether the yarn is dyed or “sheep-colored.” Lindis gravitated to the yarn section, where I found her petting a skein of handspun longingly. “I get it,” Jóhannsdóttir said. “There’s a kind of witchcraft to textiles.”
When we reached Blönduós a couple of hours later, I found myself wondering if the hands that would have fit into the antique mittens on display at the Textile Museum didn’t suffer from another kind of bewitchment: They each had two thumbs. But no, explained the docent, these were Nordic fishermen’s mittens. If the palm got wet, the wearer could simply turn the mitten around and wear it from the other side.
Because shearing season was over, the Istex wool-washing facility, which cleans much of the country’s raw fleece, was closed. With nothing to do until dinner, we retired to the hotel bar, where we ordered wine and watched the steel-colored sea outside the windows for passing whales. When Lindis pulled out her needles, I surprised myself by doing the same. Suddenly, the notion of traveling halfway around the world to sit in a room and knit made a lot more sense.
Coaxing dyes from plants
We returned to the south the next day, and headed toward Selfoss. Our first stop was Hespa, a one-woman dyeing studio in Gudrún Bjarnadóttir’s home. We walked into her kitchen, where a not entirely pleasant aroma wafted from pots overflowing with yarn being steeped in various hues.
Bjarnadóttir, who also offers workshops, obtains her dyes from nature. As a graduate student researching the historic applications of wild plants in Iceland, she learned they were used to produce colors. “At that point,” she said, “I completely lost control.”
Today, that loss of control manifests itself in the astonishing array of shades she coaxes from plants, many indigenous. The lupine that carpets the countryside in summer yields a strong yellow. Lichen, which Bjarnadóttir has a permit to forage from a location she keeps secret, produces a range of browns. Green requires extra intervention: The dyer must add copper — a penny or a bit of wire — to get moss’ colors to stay. The excess onion skins the local supermarket saves for her produces yellows and rust. “I dye with the same process as people did in the old days, but with better equipment,” Bjarnedottir said.
Better, and less stinky. To get the ammonia needed to fix colors, Icelanders traditionally used aged cow urine. “You would need 40 gallons at a time, so they used to tickle the cows to get them to pee,” she said. “Then you had to let it age for three weeks.”
A slow process
The theme of time kept popping up. Wool-working might be a cornerstone of Icelandic culture, and handcrafted textiles might remain an important export, but the vast amount of time required to produce a handmade knit means that the people — mostly women — who produce the work cannot earn enough to ever have it be more than a hobby.
At the Thingborg cooperative, an adult lopi sweater, handmade by one of its 65 knitters, sells for around $250, of which the knitter gets 60%. It will have taken her anywhere from 14 to 25 hours to create, and she must buy her own yarn.
“You could knit all day long and would earn wages that are not even close to being legal,” said Magret Jonsdottir, who runs Thingborg. Some cooperatives have petitioned the Icelandic government to exempt handcrafted textiles from the value-added tax.
You start with the sheep
We had one more stop. At Uppspuni, Hulda Brynjólfsdóttir and her husband, Tyrfingur Sveinsson, process wool from their own sheep into yarn. It is the sheep, Brynjólfsdóttir explained, that make Icelandic wool so special. The short-legged breed has a double coat, with coarse outer strands that repel water, and a fluffy inner fleece that makes it especially warm. “We always say that the production of our yarn starts when we decide which ewe to breed with which ram,” she said.
From the knitters to the dyers to the millers to the sheep: At each stop it felt as if we were pulling out one layer of Icelandic tradition to reveal the next. By this point in our journey, Lindis had finished her own lopapeysa, knocked out a pair of baby bootees and was a third of the way through a navy pullover. I still hadn’t quite finished my slightly lumpy headband.
But when Brynjólfsdóttir led us upstairs to the small shop where Uppspuni sells its yarns, I decided it was time to commit. I bought a pattern, needles and several skeins of sheep-colored yarn. I might not be a skilled knitter yet, I told myself, but I knew how to unravel.