An artist is an author is a knitter is an artist on volcano island

I spend a great amount of my time crafting (mostly knitting), and most of the time I do this alone and by myself. Yes, I like a lot to create alone, I like the calmness and the possibility to let my thoughts run free and being myself. However, sometimes it gets boring and I feel like I am missing out on inspiration. After all, I am on ARTIST ISLAND (it is, just ask the internet about the density of Icelandic book writers and bands and painters) and it is an island of knitters. So a few days ago I decided to reach out and start connecting with other crafters here in Iceland. There is a little yarn shop in the little town Borgarnes which organizes a knitting café once a week and I decided to be un-shy and drop by. I arrived half an hour late, so when I opened the door of the yarn shop I was looking into a round of women who immediately interrupted their conversations turning their heads looking who was at the door. (And there my "un-shyness" ended.) They welcomed me immediately into their circle and served me coffee and liquorice candies. Shyness is a term unfamiliar to Icelanders. (I like this though I sometimes have a hard time learning this.) It was interesting listening to what they had to see. They spend about half an hour gossiping about Keflavík, the international airport's town, telling each other how over-fancy it was and how people were competing about all the time who has the coolest stuff and how people had become weird there. (Actually this might be true, Keflavík is a pretty special place after all. It's built on the tip of a big flat lava field and there is nothing there - apart from endless flat lava, the sea and well, a fancy international airport, so how to NOT become a bit weird living there?). And when you see it from an "international" point of view, it's a bit hilarious listening to people from an off-road Subarctic volcano island talking about how weird people on this volcano island are. ;)
However, my favourite moment was when somebody pulled a book out of her bag and started reading it aloud to us. "Like in the old times", I thought, "when women have been sitting together knitting and listening to the sagas." The book was written by an artist called Ásta (there you have it: an artist is an author is an artist in Iceland) and once she was working as a driver on night shifts driving on the ring road. To keep herself awake she spun a story in her mind and when the time was right, she wrote it down and released three books recently. (Well, as far as I understood.) The chapter we were listening to was about a guy who was working at the road traffic department in some middle of Nowhere in North Iceland and one night, when a snow storm was blustering and he felt depressed, somebody came with a jeep from the highlands and lost control of the car and slipped into an ice cold river. The guy run out of his little hut, jumped into the ice cold water and managed the grap the injured jeep driver. "What to do?!", he thought desperately, holding the injured man being trapped in the painfully ice water. At this point, the woman who was reading the book decided this was enough for the day and closed the book leaving me with a big unspoken "HOW CAN YOU STOP NOW?!" question in my mind.
Anyway, maybe I have a chance listening to the continuation next time. I discovered how much I enjoyed it to craft in a circle of other crafters and being read a story. And this is how many of the evenings went in older times here on volcano island. You told stories. Stories, stories, stories.
Sometimes I think there is so much to discover for me on story volcano island and I even haven't been starting digging into it. And there is a big treasure to find in the Icelandic arts and crafts. 
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By the way, here is what I made in knitting café:

My first crocheted granny squares.

These crocheted little "granny squares" are quite trendy at the moment among crocheters/knitters, and you can sew them together to a blanket or a pillow case. (I just taught myself how to make them. Thanks to the great amount of resources on the internet.)