![]() ![]() The more interlocking you do, the more elastic the finished piece. You might pull your yarn through just one or two previous loops in your work or as many as nine loops, depending on the stitch you’re making. To make a stitch, you don’t pull one small loop through another, you draw your whole piece of yarn through the loops you want to interlock with, the way you’d pull a whole length of embroidery floss through fabric. Instead of pulling from a whole ball of working yarn, in nålbinding you use a short length of working yarn, just a few feet at a time. How does nålbinding work? Just like in knitting and crocheting, you make a fabric by interlocking loops of yarn, but there are a couple of big differences. The English city of York was once a Viking settlement called Jorvik, and the Coppergate Sock, which she made her own adaptation of, probably belonged to a Scandinavian settler or trader in the 900s. “The very first stitch I did was the York stitch, which was found in a sock in York in the Coppergate dig,” Fossett says. Re-enactors of the Viking period, like Swedish author Nusse Mellgren, have also produced lots of step-by-step guides to nålbinding. Nålbinding is “to bind with a needle.” Fossett learned how about 15 years ago through a group she belongs to, the Society for Creative Anachronism, which is dedicated to preserving the skills and customs of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. “Nål” sounds like “knoll” and means “needle” in the Scandinavian languages. And just as if she’d come from the Viking Age herself, she says, “I made it” from “something I had for dinner.” She also uses needles made from wood, antlers, and even very 21st-century hair clips, whatever is at hand. Where did Fossett get her bone needle, someone asks. Nålbinding is how Viking Age people made hats, socks, mittens, and sieves for straining liquids more than a thousand years ago. Gathered around the big pine table in Ingebretsen’s classroom with Fossett as our guide, we’re stepping back to a time before knitting was common in the Nordic countries-probably before knitting was done there at all. That represents the unders, overs, change in needle direction, and interlocking with previous loops that go into making a Korgen stitch. The stitch Renata Fossett is teaching a group of us on this Saturday morning isn’t abbreviated with a “k” or a “p” or a “yo.” It’s written like this: UOO/UUOO F1. ![]() Learning the art of nålbinding is an ancient art. Renata Fossett (right) says families and villages had their own ways of nålbinding and handed them down ![]()
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