Honestly, this was the post I was most excited to make when I started this blog! I haven't seen many people talking about nalbinding, as it's not as widely known, but I think it could be a dark horse g/t fiber art.
The name nalbinding comes from Danish, literally meaning needle binding. It's a way to produce fabric from short pieces of wool yarn, using a large and blunt sewing needle-shaped tool to create stitches looped through one another. Tension can be kept over the thumb or the needle itself, and when torn or worn down, the fabric will not unravel!
It predates knitting and crochet by many centuries, although in form it is most similar to the latter. One stitch is worked at a time by running the needle through the working loops and the ever-growing fabric. There are many types of stitches with differing densities, tensions, and functions. Like crochet, nalbinding is very good for making things with odd or circular shapes, like socks or mittens or hats.
Nalbinding came into my radar when someone adjacent to my crafting circles asked about it, and I fell down the rabbit hole. It's still a relatively new craft to me, but it's gotten me so excited by the idea of sharing this with the g/t community!
For a brief history and demonstration of nalbinding (mostly to keep this post from being entirely too long) I highly recommend this short video. It certainly piqued my interest when I first heard of nalbinding!
The Potential
Nalbinding would be one of the easiest crafts to maintain by a tiny or a giant, in my opinion! For one thing, it's designed to use shorter amount of yarn at a time compared to knitting or crochet, which could be handy in environments of scarce wool sourcing (like a giant or tiny scavenging for materials). Wool would be ideal, since the fibers at the end of the yarn can easily be felted together in order to join a new strand, but it could likely be done with any fiber available.
The needles would be easy to come by as well since they can be made of wood, antler, or bone. So long as those materials are around, one can make a long, wide, and flat needle to use!
There are also more open-weave forms of nalbinding that could be great for mesh fabrics! Great for hunting/fishing for more outdoorsy giants/tinies, or bags for carrying larger items made with more conservative amounts of materials. Here's a tutorial video of someone using this looping style of nalbinding with plant fibers:
Nalbinding is a newer craft for me, and I'm still taking time to learn more about it! The project I have on the needle right now is going to be a small pouch-style bag; I'm not working from a proper pattern, sort of using the intuition I've learned from crochet to start a circular shape for the base, and now I'm working up the straight sides. It's still in the early stages, so it resembles a shallow bowl more than anything at the moment, but it's coming along!
This is definitely more of a ramble than previous posts at this point, but this is a craft I don't see talked about a ton and I more so wanted to put in on the g/t community radar to hopefully get a conversation started! Let me know if this sparks interest, I'd love to see other ideas for the g/t potential with this fiber art!
