Svanhild

The Svanhild shop in the pretty Faroese village of Kvívík is run by the designer Svanhild Strøm. She sells wool socks with old Faroese motifs, hand-knitted sweaters and leather shoes cut the way traditional Faroese footwear was cut.

Calling it a shop doesn't quite work, though. It's a real house from the nineteenth century, and the interior and all the old knitting things are still there. Svanhild's mother greets you at the door, tells you the story of the house, shows you the collections and will even sit down and help you knit something yourself.

The brand started with a book, "Faroe Island Knits", that mother and daughter wrote together. It came out in five languages and it collects Faroese knitting motifs along with charts for modern pieces built on them. Svanhild has been designing clothes for twenty years. She spent a long stretch as head of design at a Norwegian knitwear company, and these days she travels a lot, lecturing on the history of Faroese knitting and leaving the little museum shop to her mother, Marjun Biskopstø.

Wool stockings used to work as tax money in the Faroes, since farmers paid their landlords with them. Faroese wool is honestly a bit scratchy against a bare foot, so Svanhild knits the socks from soft Italian merino instead. The motifs are the real thing, old Faroese ones, and each of them has a name: goose eye, crown, star, rose.

The thick socks are called hosur, and they're made for rubber boots, cold floors, or feet that freeze even under a duvet. If you've come from somewhere warm, there's a cotton line with the same motifs.

The hand-knitted sweaters, jackets, cardigans and hats carry traditional motifs too. The one to look at is the old fisherman's sweater, tightly knitted with a high closed collar, because that's what Faroese sailors wore when they went out to fish for weeks at a time.

If you knit, Svanhild will sell you charts for sweaters, hats and slippers, and kits to go with them that come with Faroese wool included. The local sheep grow their wool in two layers, by the way: the soft undercoat keeps you warm and the long coarse hair keeps the wind and rain out, which is why these things are so warm and why they last for years.

The shop is proudest of its soft sheepskin shoes, made after the old Faroese shoes known as rotuskógvur. They used to be sewn from one single piece of leather, which is what gave them those folds across the front. Svanhild spent a year and a half in Portugal working out how to get the folds right in a modern shoe, and Portugal is where they're made now, every pair put together by hand.

The shop sits in a tiny house from 1895 on the west coast of Streymoy, about thirty kilometres from Tórshavn. You can find a Faroese sweater or socks with a traditional motif in the capital too, of course. What you won't find there are two women who've given their lives to these things, who dug the motifs out of old sources, brought them back and now open the door of a real Faroese house with black walls and an interior they've looked after carefully.