The yarn dyeing lady of Iceland

So I have this obsession with yarn and knitting which leads to endless hours of knitting, wool balls all over the house and constant searching of wool shops and other knit-obsessed people wherever I am.
A few months ago, such a search led me to one of the "pearls" of wool handicraft here in Iceland. And it is just 30 km away.

Guðrún Bjarnadóttir, the "yarn dyeing lady of Iceland".

 Guðrún Bjarnadóttir is dyeing sheep yarn with natural colours from mostly Icelandic plants and lichens. Actually she started this as part of her studies of the Icelandic heritage in the field of botany. (She is writing her Master thesis about how the wikings used local plants and lichens for textile dyeing.) So she started to reinvent some of those techniques, got a handfull of big pots, wool from the neighbouring sheep farms and went out to pick plants and lichens. When visiting her in her little wool garage Hespuhús there are always wool balls slowly boiling or steeping in dark tinctures in the big pots. On the right hand side, there is big shelf filled with vibrantly colourful balls of wools while the plants and lichens rest in big bags, cans and bottling jars on the left side. The little Hespuhús was just built recently and Guðrún is doing well selling her colourful wool balls to all kinds of knitting ladies nationally and internationally.
I have visited the Hespuhús two times and have to watch out not to just empty my wallet in the presence of all those wooly treasures. On my first visit I bought two balls of alasca lupine dyed yarn which quickly were knitted into this scarf:

Scarf knitted of yarn dyed by Alasca lupine. I borrowed it to my friend Hraunkarl (lava guy) the other day. :)

 The last time I visited her was on the day of Icelandic nature in September. (I was a bit shocked, though, because Gauti and I had been the only visitors on that special day ...) That day, Guðrún was experimenting with the "dyeing lichen" Litunarskóf, Parmelia. They grow in many cliffs and rocks around the coastline and give a yellowish brownish colour.

The "dyeing lichen" Parmelia sp.

Slowly boiling with some wool balls.

Voilà: the result is a different range of brownish colours.

 It's very inspiring to chat with "the yarn dyeing lady of Iceland" and we have been talking about trying out to use some local fungi for yarn dyeing. (Scandinavians have been busy since many years trying this out and publishing books about it. And yes, Iceland has forests with fungi. Truely.) However, I had to promise not to come again with this fungi idea until she would have finished her Master thesis. She said, this idea is way too interesting and would just lead to procrastinating the thesis. (Why not, it's only a thesis and theses are overestimated., was my only thought, but I didn't say it aloud. ;) )