I spent my second day in Iceland in a hotel on the outskirts of Reykjavik, trying resolutely to knit. At a coffee table with me were Ragga Sjofn Johannsdottir, my instructor, and my friend Lindis Sloan, both fluidly working the yarn with barely a glance at their hands.

And then there was me, gripping the needles as I struggled to transform two skeins of local wool into something resembling a headband. A couple of hours in, a red ring of textile with pink diamonds was beginning to emerge.

Then Sjofn Johannsdottir noticed a mistake in a previous row. Taking the needles, she began ripping out my hard-earned stitches. “If you can’t unravel,” she said with a jolly laugh, “you can’t knit.”

It was a counterintuitive way of spending a vacation in Iceland. Most people travel to the island nation for steamy soaks in the milky waters of the Blue Lagoon or nighttime treks to see the northern lights. But in a country with a deeply ingrained craft tradition, a climate conducive to sweaters and about 10 times more sheep than people, knitting tourism is on the rise.

Pattern designer Helene Magnusson is largely responsible for this. She organizes tours that take a deep dive into Icelandic wool culture, including visits to sheep farms, spinning factories and dyeing studios.

But at the core of the tours is the time set aside to sit somewhere cozy and knit. “Three or four hours a day together, knitting, you make some good friends,” Magnusson said.

A knitting paradise

Magnusson wasn’t offering tours when I was in Iceland, but she helped me put together a DIY version. I invited Sloan, who is from Norway, another country that takes wool seriously.

Just how seriously Icelanders take it quickly became clear in Reykjavik, where at least one 24-hour grocery store stocks shelves of yarn for 2 a.m. knitting emergencies. A knit-goods paradise, the capital has plentiful yarn stores and outlets selling finished garments — from contemporary designers to secondhand stores where legions of ungrateful Icelanders consign the gifts their grandmothers have painstakingly crafted for them.

But the mecca for classic Icelandic sweaters is the Handknitting Association’s shop, with floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with fuzzy cardigans and pullovers.

Marta Makuchowska, originally from Poland, works there. She moved to Iceland to go to university and ended up not only writing her thesis on the knitters’ cooperatives, but learning to knit “lopepeysa” — the typical Icelandic sweater made from thick, unspun yarn knit with an intricate circular pattern at the yoke. “It was a good way to fit into Icelandic culture,” she explained.

A true Icelandic sweater must be handmade, and cooperatives like the Handknitting Association act as a guarantor of quality. Founded in the 1970s to increase the bargaining power of women supplementing the family income, the association requires potential members to audition (with a sweater) and ensures that their work meets strict criteria: It must be made with wool from Icelandic sheep, conform to approved patterns and be knit in Iceland.

Learning the craft

Based on Magnusson’s advice, Sloan and I devised a plan: Drive north along the coast to Blonduos, home of the country’s main wool-washing facility and only textile museum, then cut inland and return south, where there are wool-related cottage industries.

First, however, I had to learn to knit.

Which is where Sjofn Johannsdottir came in. A retired schoolteacher, she holds workshops for all levels of knitters. I was not a novice, but my technique is terrible. I was counting on my wool journey to help me improve.

Sjofn Johannsdottir had firm ideas about technique but a warm pedagogic style gleaned from decades of teaching math and crafts (Icelandic children learn to knit in school). She showed me how to cast on stitches and how to unite them on round needles so that, in typical Icelandic style, the finished garment would have no seams.

Going north

The following day, Sloan and I headed north. In Bogarnes, we stopped at Ljomalind, a cooperative where brightly colored sweaters shared shelf space with jars of rhubarb jam and earrings carved from ram horns.

Later, we found the Ullarselid cooperative. Inside, Hugrun Johannsdottir, an avid knitter and Viking reenactor (with the Runic tattoos to prove it), explained that the cooperative had been founded in 1992 to teach wool-working and “to prize women’s work.”

When we reached Blonduos a couple of hours later, I found myself wondering at the antique mittens on display at the Textile Museum: They each had two thumbs. The docent explained that these were Nordic fishermen’s mittens. If the palm got wet, the wearer could simply turn the mitten around and wear it from the other side.

Because shearing season was over, the Istex wool-washing facility was closed. With nothing to do until dinner, we retired to the hotel bar. When Lindis pulled out her needles, I surprised myself by doing the same. Suddenly, the notion of traveling halfway around the world to knit made a lot more sense.

Dyes from plants

We returned to the south the next day, and headed toward Selfoss. Our first stop was Hespa, a one-woman dyeing studio in Gudrun Bjarnadottir’s home. We walked into her kitchen, where a not entirely pleasant aroma wafted from pots overflowing with yarn being steeped in various hues.

Bjarnadottir, who also offers workshops, obtains her dyes from nature. As a graduate student researching the historic applications of wild plants in Iceland, she learned they were used to produce colors. “At that point,” she said, “I completely lost control.”

Today, that loss of control manifests itself in the astonishing array of shades she coaxes from plants, many indigenous. The lupine that carpets the countryside in summer yields a strong yellow. Lichen, which Bjarnadottir has a permit to forage from a location she keeps secret, produces a range of browns. Green requires extra intervention: The dyer must add copper — a penny or a bit of wire — to get moss’ colors to stay. The excess onion skins the local supermarket saves for her produces yellows and rust. “I dye with the same process as people did in the old days, but with better equipment,” Bjarnadottir said.

Better, and less stinky. To get the ammonia needed to fix colors, Icelanders traditionally used aged cow urine. “You would need 40 gallons at a time, so they used to tickle the cows to get them to pee,” she said. “Then you had to let it age for three weeks.”

A slow process

The theme of time kept popping up. Wool-working might be a cornerstone of Icelandic culture, and handcrafted textiles might remain an important export, but the vast amount of time required to produce a handmade knit means that people — mostly women — who produce the work cannot earn enough to ever have it be more than a hobby.

At the Thingborg cooperative, an adult lopi sweater, made by one of its 65 knitters, sells for around $250, of which the knitter gets 60%. It will have taken her anywhere from 14 to 25 hours to create, and she must buy her own yarn.

“You could knit all day long and would earn wages that are not even close to being legal,” said Magret Jonsdottir, who runs Thingborg. Some cooperatives have petitioned the government to exempt handcrafted textiles from the value-­added tax.

You start with the sheep

We had one more stop. At Uppspuni, Hulda Brynjolfsdottir and her husband, Tyrfingur Sveinsson, process wool from their own sheep into yarn. It is the sheep, Brynjolfsdottir explained, that make Icelandic wool so special. The breed has a double coat, with coarse outer strands that repel water, and a fluffy inner fleece that makes it especially warm. “We always say that the production of our yarn starts when we decide which ewe to breed with which ram,” she said.

From the knitters to the dyers to the millers to the sheep: At each stop it felt as if we were pulling out one layer of Icelandic tradition to reveal the next.

When Brynjolfsdottir led us to the small shop where Uppspuni sells its yarns, I decided it was time to commit. I bought a pattern, needles and several skeins of sheep-colored yarn. I might not be a skilled knitter yet, I told myself, but I knew how to unravel.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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