Woo hoo, I finally can tell you about my amazing trip to Iceland that I went on about a month ago! Well, I can't tell you everything because there will be a full write up in the mag in our December issue, but I can share with you a few sneak peeks at what I got up to and what I saw and how on earth I ended up there in the first place.

Introducing...ICELAND! The land of THIS...



...and THIS...



Check out the beautiful Nordic jumper...sigh...if they hadn't cost approx £90 I would have had one myself...

We were invited, about a week before the event, to fly to Reykjavik to cover the country's first Nordic Knitting festival – a week long festival of events including workshops, lectures, markets, art exhibitions, quizzes and knit graffiti, unbelievably, never before witnessed in Iceland, a country with a rich cultural heritage of knitting! As it was a 'Nordic' knitting festival, not just an Icelandic one, this also meant involving people from Sweden, Norway and Finland to name just a few.

I took along my friend Amy, a budding photographer who jumped at an all-expenses paid trip to the land of hot springs, geysers and lopi and off we went, without really any idea what to expect at all. Do they speak English? Is it as expensive as people say? Is the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa as fabulous as it looks in the guide book? The answer to all those questions is...YES. So here we go, a tantalising peek at my trip...

This is the lovely Ilmur Gísladóttir who works at Nordic House Cultural Centre. She not only invited us to the festival but organised the whole thing.

(Random Icelandic fact: Everyone is listed in the phone book by their first names as ALL women's surnames are named after their father's first name ie Gisladottir means literally daughter of Gisla. If she had been a boy she would have been Gislasson)



This is Amy and me just hanging out. Everything in Iceland is so freakishly big! Just kidding, it was a sculpture outside the Nordic House. It's also about 11pm at night – June is one of the months of the Midnight Sun and it never got darker than this. Ever.



There was a fantastic soft sculpture art exhibition. Check out these felted 'seal pelts'.



And these gruesome insects!



Ah yes, and me in the infamous City of Stitches by Isabel Berglund.



Smile for the camera at all costs. I think I look quite casual considering just how HEAVY this yarn jacket is.



Well, that's all I'm going to share I think for the moment as I need to save some of it for the article, but I wanted to share a little bit with our readers because, frankly, I WENT TO ICELAND – how cool is that?!