Embroidery

Icelandic has a phrase, Glöggt er gests auguð, which as far as I understand it translates as "the visitor's eye sees much"; that which is noticed can be both a good or a bad thing. I was over at my friend Claire's house last night for a party; they rented the place fully furnished, meaning not just the furniture but also the art work and decorative pieces throughout the house. I found myself looking at an embroidered silk pillow she had, and it seemed to me it had been purchased abroad, because actually, with some notable exceptions, embroidery is not the art form here in Iceland it is elsewhere in the world. Knitting on the other hand excels here.

For many years, I had a cloth that my great grandmother on my father's side had embroidered. I used it as a table cloth, but my father recalls that his grandmother had used it as a bedspread, back when people really did distinguish between bedspreads and blankets. I recently gave it back to my father, and I wondered if that was why this pillow caught my eye. I remember looking at the stitching of my great grand-mother's cloth all the time, how very tight the thread was looped together, how clean the edging, but also not entirely perfect; it was clearly hand-sewn. I found it mesmerizing, to think of the time it took to make that, how painstakingly she must have worked at it, slowly placing each stitch in, one by one.

Icelanders I think generally speaking lack the patience for this kind of work. Witness the bankahrun.