Source: Iceland – the textile museum | ella Gordon
An interesting post about the Textile Museum in Blönduós, Iceland, by Ella Gordon, with photos of some of the exhibits from her trip earlier this year.
The underlying theme of all the museum’s exhibitions is “Þráður” or the “thread” connecting all textile techniques, past and present. Traditional knitting is featured, beyond the ubiquitous Lopapeysa or Icelandic jumper popular since the 1950s, including mitts, shawls and the patterned insoles used in traditional fish skin shoes.
The museum also has a space called “Halldórustofa” or Halldóra´s Room, devoted to the textile collections and work of Halldóra Bjarnadóttir, a twentieth-century champion of women’s rights, home crafts, textile education and traditional Icelandic textiles. See Gudrun Helgadottir’s 1991 paper, ‘Halldóra Bjarnadóttir And The Development of Textiles As A School Subject in Iceland’, from the Proceedings of the 3rd Nordic Research Conference in Slöjd, Göteborg, Sweden.
Ella Gordon, a textile maker who also works at Jamieson & Smith and is a trustee of the Shetland Textile Museum, writes about her knitting, her collection of vintage knitwear and life on Shetland at her blog https://ellagordon.wordpress.com/.
