Vidar Lilleespe Head of dyeing and finishing department Gudbrandsdalens Uldvarefabrik September 2013

I've been at GU for twenty years, doing the dyeing, washing and finishing in all those years. I am presently head of the department, but I started as production worker. In 1993, the adventure of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics had ended. We who worked to build the Olympics went through hard times, and there were no available jobs within my field. I got a tip that they were looking for people here at the mill, so I just showed up at the office one day asking. They told me I could meet the following morning. It was completely new to me; I didn't know a thing about textiles. I'm from up the valley, from Gausdal. I had perhaps heard about something called a woollen mill, and noticed that they were hiring. But the mention of textiles made me go, no. And if you are from a farming village, and have been driving tractors, milking cows and stuff like that, you don't associate textiles with what you are wearing, because that you call clothes. Textiles are kind of like something different altogether.

When I started I soon became interested and I realized I wanted to work within this field. I am a person who needs challenges. I get so bored doing the same thing every day, and I have to have something to aim at. This is the reason I took a certificate in 1995, in dyeing, finishing and printing. After two years, I was offered more textile education. Then I chose to study at Teko Centre Denmark in Herning. It was fifty per cent dyeing techniques and fifty per cent business management. For two years I was down there with full wages paid by GU.

We use three dyeing methods. We dye pieces of finished fabrics, we dye yarn and we dye fleece, both wool and viscose. Through wet finishing we do fulling, washing, fixation and carbonization. When the fabric is dry we can treat it with shearing and decaticing. So, there are many processes a textile goes through to be the same every time. It is crucial to follow the list of operations and recipes. To get a high quality finishing right you must possess dexterity and experience. You have to adjust every quality to get the touch you want it to have. So, we are talking about experience, you must have it in your hands. That's it.

I think that we who work with textile manufacturing in Norway are a dying breed. It is not possible to get a specialist education in textile production in this country. You have designers and product developers, but when you get down to do the production, to do what they ask for, there is no education. Then we must retrieve experience from older people who have worked in the industry for a long time and who bring their knowledge onwards. Meanwhile we must acquire new knowledge abroad. When we are hiring we never get anyone with textile experience in Norway.

The fact that we have the whole production line under one roof is the biggest advantage we have. Without this, it is not certain that we would still be in business. If we get a rush order or make mistakes, we can reprioritise and move fast. That is impossible if you rely on a subcontractor abroad. We can say yes, then we dye today, weave tomorrow and do the finishing the next day. Done! Ready for the customer. Had GU chosen to outsource dyeing or the finishing, we who work in this department would have had to look for other jobs. And if they suddenly wished to onshore the production, well, they would find both equipment and workers, but they would not find the knowledge to continue a high quality production just like that. It would take many years.

I am proud of my skills. If I were not proud, I would have found something else to do. You are supposed to do a good job and also feel good about it. And you should really feel that your job is important, not only for yourself but for the other seventy people in the house. We are all depending on each other. If one person is doing a poor job on the line then the next will have much more work correcting the errors. So you need to focus on delivering the goods from your hand with the right quality, at the right time and in the right amount. It is important in a manufacturing company that everything runs smoothly.