Margunn Fester Strikk

The people around her know her as a mother, a very nice person, a nature lover, someone with an inexhaustible enthusiasm for many things, a walker, a world traveller, but especially as a passionate knitter. “She’s been knitting for as long as I’ve known her, which is decades,” says Elin, Margunn’s good friend and Kari’s sister.

Margunn lives at Algrøyna, right by the North sea coast, west of Bergen. This location provides the peace and quiet she needs for her inspiration, which she applies to the beautiful woollen products that she makes in her own studio. There’s wool everywhere. There are different types and a wide range of different colours — a spacious workplace for designing her designs and a state-of-the-art computer-controlled knitting machine.

Margunn went to college, a 2-year full-time course, where she learned not just the technical aspects of this way of knitting; she also learned a lot about design. An important part of this course was the creation of modern designs with a taste of folklore. In her studio, you can still see the complex, truly unique pieces of work she created during this course. They are experiments in patterns, techniques and different wool qualities.

Aware of nature and the environment, she mainly buys her wool in her own country, from the century-old wool-processing factory in Knarvik. (Why import wool from New Zealand if we can get the best wool, made with the greatest care, in our own country?) This family-run factory, with the fifth generation at the helm, exclusively processes wool from local Norwegian sheep into a very good end product in the most beautiful colours.