During the spread of coronavirus brands and designers started to think about new concept for the facial mask. Some of them created futuristic and innovative masks, some others considered this moment as the perfect one to experiment new techniques playing with shapes, imagining fantastic worlds.

Surfing on the net, we discovered the knitted masks by  Ýrúrarí Jóhannsdóttir.

Ýrúrarí is an Icelandinc textile designer based in Reykjavík. Her work comes mostly through knitting; she started by adding knitted 3D elements, such as tongues and faux mouths with teeth to second hand sweaters.

The textile designer started making her knitted masks in the beginning of April when the virus was at its peak in Iceland. Before the lockdown and the change of the everyday  the Iceland-based designer was working on a big show of up-cycled sweaters collaborating with the second-hand stores of the Red Cross of Iceland for Design March in Reykjavík.

Since, the Design March got delayed until the end of June, the designer started to enjoy her spare time and using it to create her unique masks.

The idea evolved from her former sweater creations, where she transformed something normal, that we use everyday, such as a second-hand sweater, into pieces of arts. For her the sweater is like empty canvas, and the wool is like a pencil.

Since the face-masks are becoming such a necessity and part of our life, the Reykjavík-based designer thought it could be interesting to translate her ideas into a mask.

“I was not expecting to connect well with the form of the face mask, but it makes sense, I do use forms of the face and expressions a lot in my usual work. So before really noticing it I had already made a small line of knitted face-mask” said the designer, who thought that this was just a pet project to keep on creating and doing something.

While, suddenly, thanks to social networks, her creations became so popular all around the world. They’ve been appeared on Russian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic articles… and more.

The subjects of her masks are grotesque mouths with enormous tongues. 3d knitted elements that create funny faces.

At the beginning the designer didn’t make the masks to wear, she created them to be more wearable sculptures.

Scary dreaming visions that transform the face. Giant mouths with braces, so trendy right now among teenagers, a lot of little tongues that come out from creepy mouths that let the person who wear it become a character of Tim Burton movie.

Ýrúrarí said that the mass are not made for safety. They should be considered more as a fun item perfect to the rule of keeping distance.
“If you look scary enough people will stay away!” said the designer. ” The masks could work as fashionable covers over the real deal face masks”.

“I‘m very happy with the responses for my masks, and they seem to give people some laughs and smiles. This is a good time to spread out some joy while we keep on following all safety measures, take care of each other and wait for this to end” these are the words of the designer and we think that is is the perfect scope of this project. We laughed a lot and enjoy every single picture!

Keep safe and remember to smile, always!

Have a look to Yrurari Instagram profile:  Instagram: yrurari to discover her fantastic world.