"I've meant to find out more about Icelandic knitting all year. Icelanders knit everywhere. On buses, in restaurants, during meetings, in class. In the first week of term, several students came into the classroom, put down their cups of coffee, took off their coats, hats and scarves and pulled out laptops, power cables, poetry anthologies, knitting needles and wool. I didn't, I decided, mind. (Not that I would have dared, then, to say if I did.) I can crochet while watching a film. Women in Shetland and St. Kilda used to knit, often rather complicated patterns involving several colours, while walking miles with toddlers over rough ground to milk the cows. Icelandic undergraduates, it turned out, can knit while drinking coffee, taking notes on their Apple Macs and making enlightening contributions to discussion of Lyrical Ballads. I watched the pieces grow from week to week, comforted, somehow, by the progress of socks and matinee jackets as we worked our way through from Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' towards The Prelude, as if knitting were a manifestation of accumulating knowledge. Colleagues knit in meetings, which seems a far more constructive use of time than the doodles produced in the English equivalents. I wonder if anyone would say anything if I tried it in committees at home, instead of drawing borders of trees and wonky geometrical patterns around the minutes. A couple of cafés have a kind of free-range knitting, left in baskets for anyone to continue, although the results aren't as exciting as you'd hope. Every Icelandic girl, the students tell me, has to make at least one Icelandic sweater. It's a rite of passage, a step on the road to full Icelandic status."
From Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland
During her year in Iceland, Sarah goes to visit local 'knitting goddess' Ragga Eíriksdottír, the force behind Knitting Iceland. Ragga talks about the benefits of knitting:
"It's good for people's self-esteem, especially now people don't make things much, they sit in front of a screen all day. Lots of knitters say they're not creative but they are, even if they follow a pattern they choose the yarn and the colour, make it new and different from anyone else's sock or sweater. And then there's the second step, the activity, and that's a kind of physical mantra, monotonous, repetitive, or of course with a more challenging pattern it can be quite complicated mathematics or like chess: you're thinking ahead, three, four, five moves. And then you get the results, and that's where you find your self-confidence."
