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Jonna Helin

@jonnahoo

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I did it my way.
Founder, CEO and Creative Director of @laine_magazine.
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49 today.

I’m spending my birthday in London, just like last year. In a way, alone, on a work trip — and in another way, anything but. Surrounded by friends who live all over the world. People I first met through work, and who over the years became trust, encouragement, friendship, love.

I sometimes feel like I keep writing the same thing every year: that the year has challenged me. But oh man, this one really has.

Personally, life has been steady, at least steadier than last year. Professionally, absolutely not. There have been tough things and brilliant things, disappointments and opportunities, moments when I have had to look very closely at myself and ask what I actually want next.

And maybe that is what 49 feels like.

More courage.
More curiosity.
More willingness to take risks.
More desire to succeed, but also more longing for a quieter kind of life.

So what am I taking into my final year of my forties?

Never stop being a badass.
Never be afraid to really look at yourself in the mirror, the darkest parts too.
Learn to value the good parts.
Be kind.
Do not swallow every piece of bullshit handed to you.
Be honest.
Stay true to yourself.
Say “I love you” while you still can.

This year I have once again travelled the world. I have spoken about @laine_magazine, about creativity, about work, about my own life. I have received letters, cards and hugs. I have cried and laughed with people.

And I have been lucky enough to love my girls fiercely. To miss people when life gets too busy. To feel real friendship with people who have walked beside me for years. To admire and love my colleagues. To give and to receive.

And now, please go watch the whole carousel. Because somehow, at 49, I still got a lump in my throat when my favourite @ilveshockey player, @parikka, wished me happy birthday. Huge props to the best guys at Ipa. You know who you are. 💛💚

#birthday #life #love #family by @jonnahoo

New York, one last day.

This trip was all about A Woolen Affair and NY Sheep & Wool — or Rhinebeck, as everyone calls it. Those days are a blur in the best possible way: non-stop everything, moving from one conversation into the next, books, hugs… There’s hardly any time to check your phone, let alone take photos, so I have next to nothing to show you. I’ll come back to those few photos later.

But for now, just this: thank you. For every conversation, every hug, every kind word, every encounter.

These photos are from our last twenty-four hours in New York. A couple of meetings, some storage sorting and then, finally, a tiny moment simply to be.

The Lower East Side is my New York. I don’t really long for Times Square or the foot of skyscrapers. Give me lower buildings, smaller streets, bookshops, places that still feel like someone made a choice.

I could happily have stayed for another day just to photograph it. Or a month. Or two. To write, knit, walk, make notes, create something new.

Happy to be heading home to my girl gang now. Ten more minutes on the plane.

#newyork #lowereastside by @jonnahoo

Today, @gudrunjohnston’s Shetland Shades: Stories in Wool is finally out.

At the end of April, I travelled to Shetland to photograph the book. I had wanted to visit the islands for years, but I don’t think I understood until I was there how deeply the place lives inside Gudrun’s work.

The wind. The rain. The sea. The colour of the hills. Sheep everywhere. Stone houses and washing lines and small roads disappearing into the landscape. Nothing polished. Nothing trying too hard. Just life, wool, weather and people.

One evening, after a long shooting day, we walked down to Meal Beach, just a short walk from where we were staying. That’s where we photographed the image that eventually became the cover.

Nearby, we visited @donnasmithdesigns and her sheep. Mist over the bay, chickens underfoot, a sheepdog working, Gudrun feeding sheep from a plastic bucket. One of my favourite photographs from the whole book. There was something about that place that felt so completely honest, ordinary in the best possible way.

We also photographed in Gudrun’s home village, at @jamiesonsofshetland, around Lerwick, on beaches and hills and farms. I swam at St Ninians. I lived in waterproofs and a wool hat in April. My fingers were permanently cold. None of it mattered.

What mattered was getting to see the place that shaped Gudrun. Her home island. The source of so much of her colour, her knitting, her way of seeing.

Now the book is here, and on Sunday I get to go back.

Back to Shetland for @shetlandwoolweek. Back to celebrate this book with Gudrun, to interview her in front of fellow knitters, and to be among my people again.

I also get to show her the vests I’ve knitted from the book, which feels like a very appropriate full circle.

Congratulations, Gudrun. And thank you for trusting @laine_magazine with this book, your stories and this piece of home. It means more than I can say. ❤️

#gudrunjohnston #lainepublishing #lainemagazine #shetland #knitting by @jonnahoo

A few days in Northern Portugal felt like stepping sideways out of real life for a moment.

Into late summer. Warm sun that left freckles on my arms. Long meals, knitting, wine, laughter, mountains, small roads, old stone walls. Friends around me. Time to be quiet, time to talk. To see and be seen.

Yesterday was the long way home, fourteen hours in the air and on the road. Then pizza with my girls, sauna, cats tucked close and an episode of Australian MasterChef. Hard to improve on that kind of homecoming.

Today straight back to work. Got a lot done, even though it feels like I got nothing done. My friend told me about keeping ”a done list” instead of only a to-do list. Adopting that immediately.

But first, I’m letting my mind wander back to these windows I photographed in Valença on Sunday. Quiet little worlds behind glass. Full of objects, reflections, lace, dust, lives I know nothing about.

#portugal #valença by @jonnahoo

Scarborough knit-along starts today and we are already casting on. Who’s in? 🙋🏻‍♀️

All details can be found on our website, just click the link our bio! 💌

#scarboroughkal #scarboroughsweater #jonnahelin by @jonnahoo

Reading diary, lately.

The fact that my last book post was two weeks ago says something about life lately. I’ve basically been working, with occasional hockey and Champions League football as life support.

So I haven’t really read, as in, held a physical book in my hands. But I have listened.

Sara Stridsberg’s The Goodbye to Panic Beach stayed with me. Alcoholism moving through generations. The strange ways children normalise what should never have been normal, carry adult responsibilities without knowing that’s what they’re doing, and grow a kind of strength they never asked for.

Then Olivier Norek’s The Winter Warriors. I studied history for years, especially the world wars and their aftermath, so I wanted to hear the Finnish Winter War told by a French writer.

What stayed with me wasn’t heroism. It was the cold, the loyalty, the absurdity. Ordinary people doing impossible things because there was no alternative. No glorification, because there is nothing glorious about war.

And then, inevitably, I went to a bookshop.

Martyr! came home because of Dua Lipa’s Service95 Book Club. I know almost nothing about it yet, which is exactly how I want it.

And Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has been calling me for ages. A tiny book about something enormous. Right now I want beautiful sentences. Rhythm. Language I can stop over and reread simply because someone put the words together that well.

Apparently, even when I don’t have time to read, I still have time to buy books. A very specific kind of optimism.

#bookrecs #bookstagram #booktok by @jonnahoo

Reading diary: this week’s books.

I was still on holiday Monday and Tuesday, which partly explains why this week’s total is three finished books (plus a few already started). I’m not a monogamous reader: different moments need different kinds of company.

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein — Deborah Levy
Levy is one of my favourite authors and a huge writing inspiration. I love the way she makes ordinary life feel profound without forcing it. Paris is everywhere in this book, but rarely through grand descriptions: it’s a neighbour on a balcony, heels sinking between cobblestones, a cat with one ear smaller than the other. Tiny details that become an entire city. Present-day Paris slips into the Paris of Stein, memory into observation, seriousness into wit.

What Kind of Paradise — Janelle Brown
I listened to this one. Stories about fathers and daughters pull me in. No surprise there, as that relationship sits at the heart of the novel I’m trying to write too, currently living as hundreds of fragments waiting to find their places.
This had some of the same momentum I loved in Yesteryear: tense, absorbing, almost cinematic, but still beautifully written. A daughter raised off-grid by an uncompromising father, slowly realising that the world may not be what she thought.

Kauneuksien lokikirja — Elina Hirvonen
Also listened, read beautifully by Anna Saksman, whose voice could probably make me listen to a shopping list.
Hirvonen writes densely but lightly: devastating, tender and ultimately hopeful. Moving through Helsinki, Kyiv and Afghanistan, the book makes history intensely human — memory, violence, fear, friendship, beauty.

By the way, Finland is definitely slipping into autumn: darker evenings, rain almost every day and some nights only a few degrees above freezing. Any recommendations for what I should disappear into next?

#bookrec #bookstagram #booktok #books #reading by @jonnahoo

Reading diary: books from my last week of summer holiday.

Books have always been one of the great constants of my life. I grew up in a tiny village and went to a school with sixteen pupils, grades one to six together. Every other week, the library bus came. I still remember my paper library card, worn and crumpled inside its plastic sleeve. Number 5549.

We didn’t have money, we didn’t travel, but books took me everywhere. They still do. They’ve shown me different lives and worlds, and they’ve made my own world, and hopefully my heart, a little bit bigger too.

This week:

Yesteryear — @caroclaireburke
Started yesterday, finished today. Captivating, sad, sharp, sarcastic and tense. A story about what happens when life becomes a performance, and how easy it is to disappear inside a version of yourself created for other people. It made me think about the courage it takes to simply be yourself.

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo — @zenaldehyde
A tiny book from the staff recommendations at @elliottbaybookco in Seattle. 1920s London, literary circles and a wonderfully witty young woman’s diary. If a book begins with “I had tea with the intolerable aunt today”, I’m sold.

The Safekeep — Yael van der Wouden
I listen to a lot of books too, and I don’t rank listening below reading. Audiobooks let me knit, drive, clean and still disappear into a story. Set in the Netherlands in the early 1960s, with WWII still casting a long shadow: beautiful, unsettling, raw and brave.

One Good Thing — @alexandrapotter
I don’t rank genres either. Different books serve different moments. Sometimes a demanding novel cracks something open in you, sometimes British feel-good, Yorkshire moors and a visit to Haworth are exactly what you need.

Maybe that’s what I love most about reading: there is always another life waiting, another place, another voice. All you have to do is open the book. 🤎

#readingdiary #bookstagram #booktok #readinglife #readingrecommendations by @jonnahoo

Photo diary: the last Friday of my summer holiday.

School run, one morning meeting, cats sleeping through all of it, books waiting to be read — and finally, finally, some knitting.

I had imagined I’d spend this whole holiday week knitting. In reality, it took me until Friday to even get the yarn out.

Today I seem to be craving earthy colours: moss, bark, stone, rust, wool. Apparently colour is a bit like vitamins. Judging by this palette, I either need to disappear into a cabin in the woods or eat a steak.

Then came the swatches, always the part of designing I want to skip because I’m impatient to start the actual garment.

But the fabric is everything.

I don’t really begin with recommended gauges or what a yarn is supposedly meant to become. I begin with the thing I can already see in my head: the weight, the drape, the surface, the feeling. Then I keep knitting little pieces until the fabric starts answering back.

I’m also currently reading and listening to the same book, Yesteryear: reading it in English when my hands are free, then finding the same spot in the Finnish audiobook when I start knitting. A surprisingly good system!

So today was winding yarn by hand, trying combinations, changing needles, making notes, reading, listening, ripping things out and starting again.

Nothing particularly dramatic happened. And maybe that’s exactly why I wanted to photograph it. A quiet day at home. A little bit of work disguised as play. Cats, yarn, books and the luxury of having nowhere else I needed to be.

#photodiary #jonnahelin #knitting #booktok #lainemagazine by @jonnahoo

One of my favourite things about photography is that it isn’t really about cameras.

It’s about seeing stories, finding beauty in small details, learning to slow down and really look.

And that’s exactly what we’ll be doing at my photography workshops at @labienaimee.

We’ll talk about photographing knitwear with intention and emotion, whether you’re using a camera or simply your phone. We’ll cover light, composition, storytelling and editing, and most importantly, how to create images that feel something.

We’ve now opened a second workshop, so there are still a few spots available. 🤎

La Bien Aimée, Paris
Saturday & Sunday, July 11–12
10:00–12:00

You can book your place through @labienaimee.

À bientôt, amis!

#knitwearphotography #jonnahelin #lainepublishing #lainemagazine by @jonnahoo