Selbu knitting — mittens from the source
The eight-petaled Selbu rose was first knitted one valley south of Hegra — and the revived Selbu Husflidscentral, in the old vicarage barn at the Selbu village museum, sells the hand-knit article at its source.
Tied to Stjørdal & Hegra
Selbu is the next valley south of the Stjørdal — about forty kilometres down Fylkesveg 705, roughly an hour’s drive from the heritage country around Hegra. In 1857 a young woman named Marit Emstad walks into Selbu church wearing a pair of two-color mittens knitted with an eight-petaled rose, and the women of the parish want them before the service is over. The pattern — the selburose, the eight-petaled rose — spreads from that pew to the whole country: by the 1930s the village is turning out something like a hundred thousand pairs a year, and the Selbu mitten has become the closest thing Norway has to a national mitten. It is the same eight-petaled rose that ornaments the corners of this site.
The place to buy the real thing at the source is the Selbu Husflidscentral — founded in 1934 as the receiving station that inspected every pair and set the standards for yarn, shape, and weight, and revived today in the old vicarage barn at the Selbu Bygdemuseum in the village centre. Hand-knit selbuvotter by named local makers, local yarn, and patterns for anyone who wants to knit their own. Summer hours run Tuesday to Sunday, roughly 11:00–16:00, closed Mondays — confirm the season’s dates before committing to the drive. And if the detour south doesn’t fit the heritage day, Husfliden in Trondheim stocks Selbu-pattern mittens too — fittingly, since Marit Emstad sold her first commercial pairs to the Trondheim husflid shop back in the 1890s.
What we plan to look for
A pair of hand-knit Selbu mittens bought one valley from where the pattern was born.