Hildarett Roundup

Here is the map published (in that same newspaper I mentioned in an earlier post) which provides the dates and rettirs (rettir is the Icelandic for corral) for the roundup: It may be too hard to read from my photo, but each name identifies a particular "rettir". The "rettir's are permanently standing corrals. Many are made of wood, like a fence. We saw one made of turf. I believe there are about 170 of them around the country.

  Generally, they feature a center circle with pens built in wedges radiating out from it,  like the spokes of a wheel . Sheep are brought down from the highlands/rangelands by horses and herded into the central pen. Then the sheep are sorted by ear tags and sent to the "spoke" of the wheel which is designated for their tag. Each tag - which might be an ear notch like the I shared on Facebook, or might be a plastic colored tag - identifies the farm, the region and the sheep.  Once sorted, each farmer then herds (with the help of lots of kids, family and friends) his/her sheep home by foot, along the road or across fields!

We were fortunate on our visit to the Lake Myvatn region to witness the rettir at Hildarett. Hildarett is one (if not "the") oldest rettir in Iceland. And it is a beautiful stone structure, as hopefully the next pictures show. It is so large, I couldn't get a single photo showing the entire structure!

 

But hopefully you can get an idea from the photo above on the right that there is a central circular pen (currently empty) and radiating out from it are the wedges (or spokes) of a wheel, some of which still have sheep in them (like the wedge in the foreground) and others are empty because those sheep have already been run home. 

In the photos below you can see that it takes a lot of people to herd the sheep from the rettir back to the home pasture. Kids of all ages are participating in the occasion and helping to keep the sheep in line! Even young adults now living in Reykyavik, like the hiking guide I had in Landmannalauger, head home on the weekends to help their parents or grandparents with the roundup. It is clearly a celebratory event. The young kids in particular were having a grand time -  first herding one batch of sheep back to the farm and then hopping  into the back of a truck - laughing and smiling - to be driven back to the "rettir" to get the next batch to herd home. Afterwards, they all gather for a feast. In fact, the Cow Shed Cafe which we had hoped to get some geothermally steamed bread from was closed on this day because they were participating in the roundup and readying for the meal afterwards. So it is an "all hands on deck" event.

 Here are just more photos of the corrals and some individual sheep to show the great range of colors. I learned so much more about the sheep and the farming economics etc, but I'll save those for tomorrow's post!

sheep, sheep, and more sheep...

I found an article in the local newspaper while in Iceland last week which featured articles about the sheep roundup and about fleeces, about horses and the local business, Varma, which knits socks that you can find for sale throughout Iceland. How I would love to have such a weekly publication here so focused on wool and agriculture!


Anyway,  my sister's friend Maryann (who lives in Reykyvik) translated the gist of one of the articles for  me since I was curious to know what point the article was  making about the fleeces.

 It turns out that in 2013 a couple of Icelandic farms decided to breed for characteristics more like Gotland sheep and this article was reviewing the progress they are making in that effort.

Although I questioned the wisdom of trying to change the Icelandic sheep (I love Gotland too, but for different reasons - so in my estimation both breeds should be preserved and cherished for what unique characteristics they each offer to spinners and knitters),  as Maryann pointed out, it is nice to diversify so hand spinners in Iceland have more variety of wool to spin with. And I'd have to agree with that! As much as I enjoy the unique colors of the Icelandic wool, I would miss not having variety in fleeces to spin - and something softer and bouncier than Icelandic!

Not all farms that are involved in this effort to "Gotlanize" the Icelandic so there will still be traditional Icelandic sheep to preserve the genetics that go back to the original sheep the Vikings brought over in 900. And maybe this effort to introduce some of the Gotland features to Icelandic will lead to an entirely new breed - one that has less variation in color, is a bit finer and more ringlet formation (?) - that we'll all scramble to spin ourselves! 

Another reason to return to Iceland in a few years!

In tomorrow's post, I'll share some pictures of the sheep roundup and some interesting things I learned about the sheep and the farming of the sheep here. But first I thought I'd share a few photos to show the range of environment that these sheep inhabit because, well....it is amazing to find sheep grazing 2.5 hours drive from absolutely nowhere!

And some of the land seems so inhospitable.No picture can quite convey the vastness of open land there, so maybe some of these figures will help:

• 78% of Iceland's land is un-arable, unproductive for agricultural purposes (it is glacier or lava fields)
• of the 22% that is arable, only 1% is actually cultivated - and 99% of that is with hay and fodder - the remainder is for potatoes!

In the north, where we focused this trip, the ratio of acres to population is 2 sq km per person (if you include the south and Reykyvik, I think the number of acres/person goes down to 1 square km!). Think about yourself standing in the middle of a 2 square kilometer (almost 4.5  miles) area and imagine that every neighbor has that same amount of land to him/herself as well!

There are about 325,000 people in Iceland (the vast majority in Reykyvik) and they wintered over about 500,000 sheep (in the summer after lambing and when the sheep are all out in the open land grazing, there are over a million - these figures are from 2013).

The sheep are let out to roam the highlands on their own devices for grazing and water from late May/early June  thru the "roundup" which happens from early Sept thru early October.  They roam on both "afrett" (which is publicly owned land up in the highlands) and also on their owner's "wild" land (rangeland that is not level and not fertilized). Since most farms in Iceland are on the order of 1500+ acres, there is a lot of land to be grazed!

 The arctic fox is really the only predator sheep have to worry about, tho' I'm told ravens and eagles can be a problem for lambs.

The dates for letting the sheep out and rounding them up are dependent on the year's weather, of course. In 2012, an early freak snowstorm before the roundup resulted in some significant losses.

And  while we were in Iceland a farm on the Skagastrond peninsula moved up the dates to roundup sheep because they were concerned about an eruption-Iceland has 130 active volcanoes. 

A side note about his "eruption" concern:

For the last month, Iceland had 4 times as many earthquakes as usual (the week before we went, I looked online at the earthquake monitoring site and there had been 35 earthquakes that week alone ranging from about 1.2 to 3.8!). The day we were at the Textile Museum, there was a 4.something-or-other which caused the  farmer some concern. Apparently Hekla has erupted every 10 years consistently until now (it is 4 years overdue) so scientists expect it to blow sometime soon. 

And although neither lava nor flooding (that's the big issue when one of the volcanoes that is beneath a glacier erupts) would impact the northern area we were in had Hekla erupted, a heavy ash falling on the grass the sheep are grazing could prove a significant problem.  So Hrafnhildur, who opened the Textile Museum for us, said she was going off the next day to help her friend's family bring in his sheep earlier than planned, just  in case!


We saw sheep everywhere - from the seashore to the lava fields, to highland pastures.

 The landscape there is so vast that at first glance you don't see any sheep. Then you see a few and think it is only a couple sheep  speckling the hillside. Then you see movement where you thought there was nothing and realize there are a lot of sheep on the hillside! 

The sheep pictured above was up a significant mountain (a few of the hikers I was with stopped below this point because the grade was too steep) and she wass enjoying the warmth from a steam vent (see the mist above her?) nearby.

On the Whale Fjord we spotted sheep on the water's edge where it appeared there was only seaweed to be had.This photo below showing the sheep grazing on the seashore is along a gorgeous fjord just a bit north of Reykyavik. This fjord is where Johannas goat farm, Haafell, is situated and it is a popular stop for the many knitting tours that come here. Since we had visited her on our last trip, we didn't stop by this trip. As some of you may know, there was a Kick Start Fundraiser for her a few years back to help her keep her family farm of goats. I participated by selling off a bunch of store models to help raise money. She raised over $100,000 and has kept the farm in her family, but reports suggest that she is trying to do too much (meat, sausage, cheese, fiber, soaps, etc) and still struggling, so that is sad to hear.

This next photo shows sheep on a hillside up north. You think you only see a few white specs, but then you see movement in places where you hadn't seen sheep before and realize there are actually hundreds there!

At this point, you might be asking yourself why all the sheep seem to be white, when the interesting thing about Icelandics is the range of colors! I know I kept wondering about this.  More about that topic tomorrow or the next day, I can't remember what I worked that into!

Anyway, the next photo shows sheep in an area that would seem uninviting (right near the base of Hekla) with not much to graze on! There were occasional patches of moss and a few hillocks of grass, but not much in this area. The sheep must have been passing thru to greener pastures! But It was miles and miles to greener pastures from where these sheep were.

One of the things we all noticed is that because of the vastness of the land, we could see for miles and miles and so things in our view looked close, but in fact were a long ways off. As we drove towards them we could see so many more sheep in these vistas than the camera could catch from this long distance off. The hills in the background of the photo below were  an hours drive from where I took the photo! In such vastness, distance is really hard to judge.

During a guided hike, we found some sheep enjoying the steam vents up in Landmannalauger (photo below). Lots of strewn lava and bright green Icelandic moss, natural hot water springs and tons of steam vents made this an appealing spot for sheep even tho' it was a 2.5 hour drive thru absolutely nothing to get there. And then about an 1.5 hour hike, UP.  And underfoot is really rocky terrain. And steep, too! Not a house, not a shed, nothing but rivers to drive thru and bumpy dirt roads for 2+ hours and still there were sheep here! It is really hard to imagine how they all get rounded up!
These sheep  didn't join us in the natural hot spring we soaked in after our hike, but they grazed all around it and enjoyed the warmth of the vents.

And look how clean this next sheep's fleece is!!  When I was riding up in the north (in a valley south of Varmahild) I rode past lots of sheep in the highlands and they were unexpectedly clean!

Apparently being out of doors fending for themselves for over 3 months keeps them cleaner than being in a fenced pasture or barn.  Here is a photo of the area I was riding in (the photo doesn't capture it well, but hopefully it gives you a sense of the vastness of the landscape) and another photo of one of the sheep we came across which seemed more curious than nervous about our presence.

If you can make out the little white dots in that vast landscape, they are sheep!

Textile Museum in Blonduos

So I'm re-starting my blog posts now that I'm back on US soil and can easily type/upload photos. For those of you who read this post about the Textile museum.....I've updated it with more information now that I can easily do so. So it may be worth a re-read!  

And I spent yesterday writing one post for each day I was in Iceland to share all sorts of interesting information about the sheep, the roundup, the fish tannery, etc. and I intend to upload one each day until I run out!

So check back tomorrow for more news!

For now.....I'll start at the Textile Museum which was the first "fiber related" stop we took.

For those of you planning a trip here in Sept., be sure you call ahead and arrange for someone to open it for you. I knew to do that so a very welcoming young Icelander, Hrafnhilfur, was there to open it for us. You will need to  pay 10000ISK (the equivalent of 8 visitors entrance fee and it works out to about $85 USD today).  That may seem expensive (most museums here charge between 12,000 ISK and 15,000 ISK to enter) ......but if you enjoy wool and textiles I assure you it is worth it!

There is currently an exhibit there by a local felter, Anna Pjordastdottir,  who has created a series of circular wall hangings using Icelandic wool - some just using the "tog" and others combing the "tog" and "thel" to produce more surface texture from the differential shrinksge of the fibers, much like the ochre colored bag I felted and have on display at the store in which I used Karakul and BFL for differential shrinkage and texture. Here is a photo of a few of her pieces :

For those of you who aren't familiar with Icelandic fleece, the sheep have 2 different fibers - tog and thel. The tog is the coarse outer long hair-like fiber that protects the sheep from the elements and the thel is the softer, shorter, more downy undercoat that keeps them warm.  Lopi yarn, which most knitters are familiar with, mixes the two together. But handspinners who purchase a fleece have the option of separating the tog and the thel.  In the next series of photos, I first show a lock of Icelandic fleece I purchased while there as it is shorn off the sheep. You can see the top whiter part is quite thick and then the "tip", which turns back at almost a 65 degree angle, is darker and more "defined".  In the second photo you can see the tog and thel separated, next to my glasses to give you an idea of the length of the fibers.  All I did was hold tightly on the tip end of the "tog" and lightly hold the fluffy "thel" and gently pull apart and you can see how easily they separate. The softer thel is quite short compared to the longer and coarser tog.  And as the photo shows, they can be quite different in color.

Here is a shawl at the museum which was spun and knit from just the tog. Despite the tog being coarser and not so soft and cozy, this shawl had an AMAZING drape to it. I'm so inspired now to make my next spinning project one in which I separate the tog and thel and spin them separately so I have a tog shawl to share at the shop!

They museum also has an unusual basket of spindle spun yarn. Unusual because it is spun from horse tail!  Horses abound in Iceland about as much as the sheep (and in as beautiful an array of colors too!) and the tail hair is regularly used to braid gorgeous ropes and hobbles (not just for horses, but I was told a traditional gift to the newlywed bride!).

In a room showing traditional garments worn by Icelandic women were lots of examples of naturally dyed and embroidered clothing. Here is a lovely example of one. And a photo of the detail embroidered on a sleeve, too!

 And of course, they had quite a few examples (middle photo) of the traditional knitted insoles for the fish skin shoes they wore (first photo shows the fish skin shoes with a striped pair of insoles). Here, in particular, I have shared a closeup of the detail embroidery on one insole (last photo). I am always struck by the fine detail that crafters/artisans from long ago- when life was so much harder than we have it today - took to make their work exquisite. I felt this so strongly after visiting the felts in the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg too. Such attention to beauty and detail when struggling to eat and have shelter against harsh weather would make you think they'd forego such details  - but they didn't. I love that they didn't short cut and that they paid such attention to details. 

And to see such a lovely array of patterned mittens and gloves knit using the natural Icelandic colors - we guessed from the size of the stitches that some of these were knit on 000s!!

This "apron cloth" woven plaid shown here is the finest ever fabric woven from Icelandic fleece - spun as a singles and sett at  200 dpi! WOW.


There was an entire room full of hardanger lace, examples of weaving, carding, combing and spinning equipment, and a bit of bobbin lace too. But what I shared above were the highlights for me.

Shoofing for Sheep....

I'm off tomorrow to shoof sheep. I just love  saying that...it sounds so nice rolling off the lips!

And I love that I have found a bridge between my earlier trip to Morocco this spring where I learned what "shoofing" meant and the trip starting tomorrow to the land of Fire and Ice!

Ironic that the PBS Newshour tonight aired a segment on how many Icelanders have mixed feelings about the country being such a "hot"  tourist destination now. With too few hotel rooms available to accommodate their 4 year running 25-30% growth in tourists landing,  many locals are being run out of the rental market because home owners/landlords  can make more money renting their housing to tourists thru Air BNB. Not too dissimilar to what is happening in San Francisco where the housing market has out priced locals and only the dot.commers can afford anything to rent or buy there!

Anyway, I'm expecting it to be more touristy than our last visit. But hopefully not too much so! What is so appealing about the place is it's natural beauty and remoteness and the lack of people in sight! Every direction you look in is just nature....at least that is what I experienced 4 years ago when my sisters and I first visited this lovely country.

Anyway, I thought I'd share a couple of book recommendations if any of you are planning a trip to Iceland.

Where the Shadows Lie - Ridpath is the author. I thought this was a light and fun mystery that gave me some insight to the people and landscape to expect. I read this before our last visit to Iceland.

Iceland's Bell - Nobel Prize for Literature awarded author Halidor Laxness. I got great insight into the mindset and heritage of the people thru this book, but it was not an easy, light read like Where the Shadows Lie.

I Remember You - author Yrsa Sigurdardottir.  I just started this earlier in the week and am enjoying another mystery set in Iceland.

A Traveller's Guide to Icelandic Folk Tales - author Jon Hjalmarsson. A compendium of short sweet tales about different places around the country. I read them before this trip, but we're taking the book with us to reread the ones that feature the places we're staying!

And of course there is always Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and a whole plethora of Icelandic "sagas" - most by unknown authors and recorded in the 1100 - 1300s based on the word of mouth passed down from ancestors in 900 - 1100.   Lots of gory death and fighting, but interesting insight to their way of life back then!

Fun Fact #1 - The PBS Newshour  shared this one tonight during their segment on the mixed feeling the local have about the increased tourism to their country: 

The population in Iceland is so small (around 300,000) that there is a phone app to be sure you aren't dating a cousin!

Fun Fact #2 - the way Icelanders are named is quite unusual. There is a list of acceptable first names (one has to petition a government board if you want to use something outside of this list!) and the sons and daughters of a man take his name and add either "son" or "dottir" to it for their last name. For example, I'm going to meet with Anna Gunnarsdottir (a felter in Akureyri) while I'm there. If she has a brother, his last name would be Gunnarsson!  

The Wall Street Journal did a nice job of explaining it all here -

Camellamangorayakalcashelmersilk Vest!

Maybe, if you are stuck on one of those projects you just can't seem to complete, this story will give you solace that you are not alone! We all have these stumbles.

In keeping with both my infrequency of posts and my desire to use this blog to record particular projects that were full of "learning" (you could read that to also mean "a pain in the neck"!), I have recorded here my journey thru the final Camellamangorayakalcashelmersilk Vest (I call it the CLG Vest for short).

May I never walk this path again!

About 10 years ago I made few sheets of felt as follows: 1 very fine layer of extrafine merino wool topped with a fine layer of either llama, alpaca, yak, camel, cashmere, or angora (moving from darkest to lightest, top to bottom) and then covered with some very heavy (I was into texture at that time, apparently) wisps of bombyx silk. I didn't take pictures of the pieces, just jumped into making a jacket from them.

Note to self:  don't be so heavy handed with the silk!

I was left with a bunch of scraps, not much bigger than what is pictured below. And at about that time, a lovely and very talented local quilter and teacher (Christine Fries of Loveabideth.com) took a nuno felting class here. In the course of talking with her about felt and about her quilting techniques, we decided she had a lot to offer felters with respect to using freeform machine stitching to create surface design on felt.

So we scheduled a class and in preparation for it she requested any scraps of felt I had so she could play with some different stitching/surface design ideas in advance of the class, which we scheduled for almost a year off.  I gave her some of the scraps from the felt jacket I made (honestly, thinking she was kind of crazy for thinking she could do anything with such small scraps!).

She came back to me a couple of months later with several examples for me to use to entice felters to the workshop. And on the side, she gave me a "reconstructed" new piece of felt from all the scraps of the CLG Vest. It was long and rectangular (should have taken a photo of it) and what she had done was use some creative stitching to stitch together all the little pieces!!! Here is a closeup that maybe will let you see some of the stitching. It is there, but is freeform and so adds to the texture and design of the piece!

 So, with a freeform attachment to my machine and inspired by both Christine's effort and the rug hookers and quilters of early America (who used every bit of viable cloth from old clothes to make rugs or quilts), I decided to take this piece of "refurbished felt" and do something with it.

Note to self: Not every piece of felt must "become" something useable. It's ok to take the learning from it and just throw the tangible part out.

About all I had enough for was a vest. And I didn't really even have quite enough for that. But since I hadn't given Christine all my ends from that project, I pulled out the rest and began stitching them to the piece she gave me. This allowed me to make a large enough sheet to make a vest.

While at the time I remember thinking that once I had cut out the fronts and back and stitched them together I was basically "done" (the hard part behind me!), it turned out that the journey had just begun. (this is the back of the vest pictured below)

Note to self: my ideas/projects are never as easy or as quick as I think they will be!


First, to strengthen the edges, I used some high twist reeled 100% silk thread to stitch a decorative chain around the front opening, neck edge and bottom edge. My intention at that point was to knit a collar using this gorgeous baby alpaca yarn that I had just started stocking called Eco Duo. You can see how lovely it matched the colors and "nature" of the fabric. So this silk chain stitch was not only going to reinforce the delicate edges of the felt, but also serve as a means to pick up stitches.

So I took picked up stitches all along the front neck edge and knit a garter stitch collar using short row shaping and it looked awful. So bad, I didn't take a photo to record it (some things are just so bad you don't need a photo record to remember!). Basically the yarn (a worsted weight) was just too bulky and heavy for the delicate fabric.

So after ripping out the alpaca yarn collar,  I decided that since "bulk" seemed to be the issue with the baby alpaca, I'd just use the 100% reeled silk thread I had stitched around the neckline edge with (see picture, right). I chose the slightly duller white (2nd from the top) to use. I picked up and knit a garter ridge and decided after about 6 ridges that maybe it wasn't  the "bulk" of the alpaca that had bothered me since I didn't like this either! I think I  just really don't like the combination of knitting with felt. I should have known this....I've never liked when weavers sew a jacket and add knitted sleeves, so why I thought I'd like this is beyond me.

Note to self:  remember that you just don't like garments that combine some knitted component with either weaving or felting...so don't go there again!

 Then in an "ah-ha" moment, I wondered why I hadn't made a nuno felted collar? Duh! It would be delicate, in keeping with the "felt" and the same fibers! 

So I nuno felted a collar (see photo right) and was totally underwhelmed by it. So I took that off.
 (BTW....those are safety pins marking where I planned on making a silk frog for the front closure)

At this point that I was so disgusted with the whole project, I let it sit in the shop without a collar for a while. My friend Lynn thought it was ok that way, but I was determined to have a collar.


So my next strategy was to  use a plain white silk chiffon fabric. Sew it on and maybe tuck/ruche it in a few places.

Rather than go thru the bother of sewing it on first and then ripping it out as I had with the 2 knitted collars and the nuno felt collar already, this time I tested the effect by simply draping it on the mannequin as shown below.

I liked that look basically, so went ahead and cut and sewed a silk chiffon collar and then tucked/ruched it here and there.

And hated it.

In disgust, I literally ripped  it off!

I was so frustrated with it this summer, that I remember tossing it into the workshop and deciding to go bake my favorite cake to feel better!






 This was the cake I baked to feel better...chocolate cake with swiss meringue (or as we called it growing up - marshmallow) icing.
It  gave me strength to go try a different silk fabric that Lynn had given me that, which instead of being as sheer as the chiffon was heavier and had a bit of a texture to it.  I didn't like that either and ripped it out as well....but somehow after a piece (or two) of cake, that failure didn't seem so bad!


So I hung the vest back up in its' unfinished, collar-less state in the store for the summer and I've been tempted a few times to sell it to a customer who has asked about buying it on several occasions. I should have just sold it to her so it would be out of my line of vision. But because I had this notion that the vest was "unfinished" and the challenge of figuring out the right collar had eluded me, I just couldn't let it go!

Note to self: Let it go! Especially if a customer wants to buy it! Let it go, let it go!

Around Thanksgiving time I relegated the vest to the back weaving room.There it hung all fall until over XMAS break, while getting out leather to work on my most recent eco-printed bag (putting leather trim on it-so excited about this project!), I came across a piece of white Tibetan lamb and in a flash, knew it was the answer to the collar dilemma.

I've sewn it on (a bit asymmetrically by design) now and FINALLY, am calling the CLG Vest done. Not sure why this version of the collar allows me to say "ok, done" (since I don't really think I like it...no, no, no... don't go there), but I'm not questioning it! It's Done. Fini.  Off my to-finish list. And it feels so good to be free to move onward wihtout this nightmare on my mind!