#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.

[mappsiemakesthings]

Nålebinding på stranden ^_^

[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…

[darkmagyk]

that you for the explanation! I'm so sorry you're having a bad week and I hope things get better. *sending virtual hugs and chocolate* no pressure, but if you want to share more percababy/percabeth hcs I would love to share your joy

Some headcanons: Most people think the Jacksons have three pets, there three cats: Himbo (name because they found him near the Himbo Juice in New Rome, and also, because he is orange), Turkey (named because they found her fighting wild turkey's on Harvard's campus. She's a calico), and Smaug (named because Paul read Junie and Lucie the Hobbit when they were little, and Smaug is black. And also, she was a gift from Freya).

However, these people are of course not counting Mrs. O'Leary, Donut (Blackjack's son, who is born when Junie is about 3, and they are best friends forever), Peanut Butter (Lucie's 6th birthday present from Poseidon. She's a Megalodon), and various Hippocampi, given at various times, and named, at Uncle Tyson's insistence, Red to Indigo.

Percy and Annabeth have never met a teacher or school administrator they would not throw down with. They spent there entire school careers being dismissed and labeled problems. And they will not put up with it directed at there kids.

They got to New Rome for college, and then both get masters at Harvard and so live in Boston for a couple of years, but they settle in NYC. They get two townhouses side by side, and Annabeth reinevates it into their dream house. The basement is actually a little demigod crash pad. Demigods in New York city know its a place for a warm bed, snacks, extra nectar, and a hot shower.

Annabeth discovers fiber crafts after Mark of Athena. And she never looks back. She weaves, she sews, she knits, she crochets, she nålebinds. She spins her own yarn when she can source the wool. And her kids are the same. Sometimes the whole family will be piled into the living room, watching Lego Masters, and everyone by Percy is knitting or crocheting or embroidering something. Even like the 3 year old is doing like a knotted bracelet thing.

(Because of her faber crafts skills, Annabeth is laundry master of the house. She can get blood, mud, and monster goo out of late Byzantine princess costumes, including historically accurate brocade, that she also made.)

She also is officially cake and cookie decorator, with her army of helpers. But Percy is the chief cook in the house.

I have more, if anyone ever wants them.

[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!