#Nålebinding

[scribblesandknots]

You know how, for a long time we didn't know nålebinding existed and people thought that those red socks were knitted and it turned out they weren't, they were made by nålebinding, you just had to know very specific details to tell which craft they were made by?

(these socks:)

I know a little bit about a lot of different fiber arts. I know: knitting, crochet, spinning, tatting, bobbin lace, needle lace, embroidery, and a little nålebinding.

Inspired by these socks, I want to create the most archaeologically confounding frankendoily out of all my crafts, and then I want to immediately commit it to a bog, for preservation. A tatted motif at the center, with a bobbin lace round around it. Maybe there's a knitted border with a crochet edge. Some needle lace motifs hanging around, but like, I'm gonna mix Romanian point lace with Battenberg styles. Something's getting embroidered somewhere. Idk.

And I'm gonna make the whole thing out of the most historically generic white cotton thread I can find, something that could maybe have been used hundreds of years ago so you can't tell when the frankendoily was made. Maybe I'll even make it over different decades of my life. Also I'm left handed, but I can do most things right handed too, and some of the crafts look slightly different depending on which hand you used as your dominant hand.

And then the whole thing is going in a bog, because bogs are really specifically good at preserving cloth, and I will go quietly into the void at the end of my life, knowing I leave behind me a very specific kind of chaos and confusion for some very specific future kindred soul.

If anyone has any additional crafts I should learn for the frankendoily, I'm all ears.

[strawberrycinema]

Finally finished this nålebinding set. Made for a friend in trade for an interchangeable knitting needle set.

[fennopunk]

I think I might have done something extremely ADHD...

I tried nålebinding once something like ten years ago, and gave up after about an hour. Since then, it's been on my kilometer long craft to-do list to try learning it and obviously haven't tried it since. I never gave hope though, I even kept my nålebinding Pinterest board and the needle I made!

So, this morning obviously I woke up full of confidence that today's the day when I will nålebind again (because I'm avoiding another task on my more pressing craft list). And apparently I have retained more info from my short stint 10 years ago and/or have acquired information by osmosis because I have managed to do this with only couple pics on Pinterest as my guide:

Yes, it not great, but considering I haven't really done this before beyond a quick try, it's weirdly good.

My actual theory is that the stitch I'm using doesn't differ from sewing blanket stitch all that much and I've done A LOT of hand sewing in the past decade... Plus, I've also gotten pretty good at knitting and crocheting too and so far the increase has worked very similarly to crochet.

[sigkit]

I'm so excited to let you know that the National Museum of Denmark's online exhibition of Archaeological Puzzles in a Museum is now open! I was honored to write Case study 8 on the fringed nalbound sock in their collection.

https://nalbound.com/2023/04/05/case-study-8-of-archaeological-puzzles-in-a-museum/

[mildly-quilted]

Has anyone ever thought that knitting was developed to be a accessibility tool for naalbinding.

Like some person out there lost their thumb and their friends knew how much they loved naalbinding, so they suggested using a stick in replacment?

[themonsterundermystairs]

used needlebinding to make a mudcrab

needlebinding (or nålebinding) is an ancient way of making stuff out of string, older than knitting or crocheting. learned it at a renaissance fair

[kinsey3furry300]

While this is very cool, the big problem with this is, sometimes the traditional crafters are dead wrong because they don't realise just how new most traditional crafts are over an archaeological timescale. This is why achedemics should reach out to other communities to see if they have insight, but also why those communities should listen to what the achedemics say in return.

I remember reading archaeological text books where it said pre Colombian Mexicans kept knives in the rafters of buildings, and we didn't know why so it must be religious. Turns out if you don't have shelves that where you put them to stop your kids playing with them, no one had ever asked a mother with toddlers where they would keep them if they lived in this space. But I also remember reading a 2000+ word essay by a modern potter on how a lot of Greek pottery must be ornamental or ritual because its unglazed and as a result porous and won't hold fluids. Yeah, you cook with it once and the fat clogs the pores, and it holds fluid after that. That's been known archaeologically basically forever, and confirmed once the scanning electron microscope was invented, but to someone who's never cooked with the pots they make, they would never see it. We thought some hairdoos on roman staues must be wigs as no one could figer out how to do it, until they asked a hairdresser, who was able to re-create it by sewing hair in place. We ignored indigenous Easter Islanders when they said they walked thier statues into place, we forgot roman concrete, Lost the recipefor greek fire... but sometimes the acedemics spot clear problems in simple solutions offered by laypeople, and it causes wild misinformation about the past to spread if not countered. Knowledge has to be a two-way street.

Its like that weird roman dodecahedron, the idea that some granny solved it and knitted glove fingers using it is really really cool...

... its just a pity that knitting as a technology wasn't known until the 11tc century AD. Its a medieval Egyptian Arab technology to make more breathable cotton, and wasn't known in Europe until after the crusades. Nålebinding, or knottless knitting, may have been known in Scandinavia as early as the 5th century, but doesn't seem to have spread south and was unknown entirely in classical antiquity. We have a lot of well preserved fabrics from Greece and the roman empire, and while corse loose-knit wool fabrics are known, they are either made on a loom or basket-woven together by hand (with one late roman helmet liner that may be Nålebinding from a danish bog and one from an alpine salt mine but that's controversial). Knitting, historically speaking, is a new technology we've not yet found the boundaries for. Crochet is white-hot bleeding edge tech, being 18th century. It will be millenia before we understand the limitations of Crochet, and that's awesome.

Sometimes the nerds in their ivory towers need to listen to some wisdom from outside their comfort zone, and Sometimes traditional craftspeople need to be gently sat down and told that there are living tortoises older than their "traditional" craft. The experts are often wrong, and arrogant about it. The same unfortunately, its also true of the non experts. If an old mystery has a clear, simple, obvious solution that appeared online in the past ten years, give it a good hard look to see if that solution actually fits the evidence. Just becaues its a logical solution to us today, doest means its the logical solution people in the past would have picked. The world isn't usually simple enough to provide us with the satisfying answer we want, and that's okay.

Edit: quite funnily since posting this I have received an article on Roman Nålebinding, and it appears that while knitting with needles was indeed unknown in classical Greece and Rome, Nålebinding was in fact known and used in both Greece and Rome, but remained a niche thing only used in certain local areas. Fiber crafts really are the academic fronteer that never rests. As Ursula Vernon said "In historical accuracy there are two groups who will always spot if you're wrong by a single year and call you out: the gun people and the textiles people, and I fear the textiles people more."

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

[melon-flowers]

Tried nålebinding for the first time, what do y’all think?

[lanibgoode]

youtube sucks so bad it can't even tell the difference between knitting and crochet

it consistently recommends me crochet videos that have "crochet" in the title in spite of me never clicking any of them, and in fact only watching ones that have "knit" or "knitting" in the titles. it in fact recommends me more crochet videos than knitting at this point. its gotten so bad i've started telling it to never recommend these channels to try to get it to stop

but it all starts up again the moment i watch a new knitting video to remind myself how to do a specific cast on or a stitch or whatever.

[darkmagyk]

stranded due to inclement weather & pwp - percabeth

Because of the prompt, this one has a little bit of sex in it. Honestly, I don't think it's graphic. But not reason to bombard people.

“We are never doing this again,” Annabeth complained. “It is the beach or bust from now on. I know you can handle a hurricane.”

“Love the faith, babe,” Percy said, but he pulled her closer, too. The cabin had plenty of blankets, and there was plenty of wood for the stove. But still, nothing beat his wife for warmth.

“Do you disagree.”

“Not at all, you’re the one who said you wanted neutral territory.”

Meaning for their weekend getaway babymoon, instead of going out to Montauk or San Francisco or Boston or anywhere else that had a pier or a wharf or a beach, they’d try something completely different, and had rented a little cabin up in the Adirondack.

It was supposed to be isolated, but supremely comfortable. Water and electricity but no internet or cell service. With a series of relatively easy hiking trails around it and a beautiful porch featuring a hot tube they could not use but great views of the changing fall leaves.

Annabeth had brought some nålebinding, Percy had brought Insula Thesauraria and Superbia et Odium at Paul’s suggestion. And they had brought a treasure trove of ingredients so when Percy got sick and tired of reading, he cook them a feast.

It was Sunday evening. They were supposed to leave 3 hours ago. Instead, a freak, late fall Nor’easter had decided to blow through. They had lost power around noon, though Percy was able to keep the pipes running. They’d used an Iris Message to contact her dad at home, and get a confirmation on the weather, and that he could keep babysitting for the next day or so, depending on how long it would take to go.

Then they’d gone back to their favorite babymoon activity. Practicing for the next one. But Percy need some recovery time.

“I didn’t know we were going to get snowed in.” “I mean, you’re the viking princess. Would have thought this was just your speed.”

She stuck her tongue out at him, “The Vikings were all about their boats, you know that. Not remote mountain cabins.”

“Yeah,” He said, “that’s why you like me so much.” He ran his hand down her side, brushing along where the curve of her belly started to jut out, and then down further.

“Are you ready again?” She asked, not quite breathless, but with an anticipatory quiver to her voice.

“No,” he said, sitting up, “but I think you are, aren’t you Princess?”

She shivered, maybe at his touch, maybe at the pet name.

“Maybe we should play a game.” He offered. “You like games, don’t you.”

She just nodded as his nails scratched lightly through the blonde curls, but did not let his fingers even dip into her folds, let alone brushing her clit or pushing into her cunt.

“You’re a viking princess, I think,” He said, finally running one finger along the inner lips, “who traveled down the Dnieper to capture a poor boy who only knows life by the warm Mediterranean Sea.”

“I captured you?” He was shifting now, moving down, until she couldn't really see his face, blocked as it was, between her thighs, and hidden by her belly.

“Of course, you did, Princess. A fine worrier would certainly have no trouble with such things. But now, we’ve been stuck in a cave, all snowed in. And I’ve decided to turn the tables”

The lore got a little lost, after that. But who needed plot, anyway. Viking Princess Annabeth didn’t mind at all.

[stagkingswife]

You guys are both wrong. Nålebinding is the easiest. One needle, one stitch per project, you work in shorter length and then felt on your next length.

You just have to be into experimental archeology to learn…..

Maybe that’s why it was the one that clicked for me.

I’ve been a little bit mad with pain and painkillers that didn’t really help since last Saturday, but in that time I sort of taught myself to knit out of spite…. I have all of this yarn that people have given me that isn’t a high enough wool content for nålebinding, and I refused to be beaten by the “basic bitch of fiber crafts” (no offense meant to all of the incredible knitters out there, but knitting has been in my head as the “I want to learn a fiber craft because I’m cute and quirky” fiber craft since high school, at least until you get incredible at it).

So now I’m almost 30 rows into a simple shawl and had to buy circular needles because it was getting to big for the needles I had, and now I’m transferring onto those…

[sigkit]

This week’s Nalbound Object of the Week is the Tarim Beret! https://nalbound.com/2024/01/23/now-tarim-beret/

Note: if you are interested in seeing these as they get published, please follow the blog. Posting notifications on social media may be intermittent (and whether the algorithms show such postings is variable).

[mildly-quilted]

Has anyone ever thought that knitting was developed to be a accessibility tool for naalbinding.

Like some person out there lost their thumb and their friends knew how much they loved naalbinding, so they suggested using a stick in replacment?

[unova22]

Ok, so, here's an image of Mephiles i got Bing image creator to generate.

And here it is cleaned up to not have a mouth and with a more accurate muzzle and inside of ears color.

I used IbisPaint X to do the fixing, I generated it because I knew AI could do it justice, I left the streaks a more green teal because changing it would've been an absolute mess considering how I had to use the magic wand tool liberally to change the muzzle color, I'm gonna ask ChatGPT to gen me a nålebinding pattern for a Shadow the Hedgehog amigurumi and make Mephiles using it, I'm o e of those artists who use ai as a tool rather than a crutch to lean on, this was made just for the profile pic for a Mephiles bot on figgs.ai because I knew that it would be easier to generate the image. Also yes, my life is entwined with ai. I legit have a keyboard app so i can have a keyboard font close to VT Portable Remington, weed leaf digital keycaps and an image of Mephiles as the background of it. If I'm ever told i don't look autistic I'll just show the fucker my phone keyboard.

[dont-leafmealone]

an overview of my developing whittling skill

Here's everything I've carved in the last couple years. It's not much, but I do it all by hand and collect the wood from the firewood scrap pile, where good pieces can be hard to find!

Here's a spoon, butter knife, and what could probably be best described as a stabber (which was my very first carving project).

here's a spool I made. Not super happy how rough it turned out but it does the job! This piece had actually been burned before, which added some neat charred spots.

and my nålebinding needles (the smallest and largest are from the same piece of wood as the butter knife pictured above):

And finally my hairpins, which were probably the trickiest to get right but also the quickest projects I've ever finished.

i used multiple coats of a 60/40 beeswax/coconut oil mixture for a finish on all the pieces after sanding, and it's held up pretty well!

[olderthannetfic]

have you ever tried a knitting machine? i have a sentro knitting machine that gives mercy on my hands. tried hand knitting my first sweater while also having several crochet projects and my fingers did not appreciate it after a month of nonstop crafting lmao. but sometimes i still wanna make a yarn thing so i bring up my tiny plastic stockinette tube maker

--

I haven't. I may give other fiber stuff a try once I've glutted myself on the hand-knit sweaters and things I currently want. (Though, tbh, nålebinding is probably next on my list after crochet and before knitting machines, looms, or spinning.)

I definitely know a lot of people who've chosen their form of fiber craft based on their hands hurting. For me, knitting hasn't been a problem unless I do it for hours and hours in one go and re-aggravate an old wrist injury.

So far, I've been knitting mostly wool or wool blended with alpaca or silk, nothing too scratchy and rustic either. It's the sort of yarn that I think tends to be particularly easy on the hands.

I've picked up some linen and cotton yarn recently, so it will be interesting to see if this changes. The 100% linen in particular I have a suspicion will be murder.