Åse Lund Jensen was a pioneer of 20th-century Danish textile arts, helping establish hand knitting as its own genre within Danish craft. Working from Nordic knitting tradition, she developed distinctive models on a high artistic and technical level, and pushed the yarn itself forward too — new types and muted, plant-inspired colors she felt suited Danish taste far better than the bright yarns of the time. She founded her own workshop in 1960, employing around sixty knitters to hand-make finished pieces sold at Den Permanente, and later shifted toward teaching as customers wanted to knit her designs themselves, publishing knitting books still regarded as classics for their clarity and design today.
Before her death in 1977, Jensen passed her business to 23-year-old Marianne Isager, then a textile student in Copenhagen with a three-month-old daughter, Helga. Today, mother and daughter run Isager together, carrying that same rooted, design-forward legacy forward from northern Denmark.
