Occasionally when you’re surfing the interwebs randomly because you’re bored (or procrastinating, which, in my case, is more often than I care to admit), you find something amazing. Today’s amazing is Naalbinding.
What is it, you ask? It’s a stone-age craft that’s being revived by a handful of people around the world. This is what it looks like (see the original here):
It’s like a combination of finger knitting and crochet, but to me the result looks nearly identical to Tunisian crochet. It’s usually done by re-enactors of Viking periods, because that’s mostly how fabrics were made back in the day; and naalbinding is widely credited as being the mother of crafts like knitting. As Cottontop at Craftster said:
Nalbinding was probably done even back in the stone age but textiles don’t survive from back then. Anyway its been found on every continent that had people, so was a pretty popular technique once upon a time. The simplest forms look like netting and are used in basketry and netmaking. Has been done continuously in rural Scandinavia, my mom said her oldest aunt used to make mittens that way.
Well there you go. There’s your craft lesson for today. If anybody finds a good tutorial on this, besides those ones at Craftster which, although good are slightly confusing, please drop a comment here or DM me on Twitter so I can go find it and, probably, blog it.
