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| Single-Needle Knitting
(often called Naalbinding) |
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| Single-needle knitting (often called naalbinding) |
| is a textile technique where the material is produced with a single needle and length of yarn, and where the entire length of the new stitch is passed through prior thread loops. |
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| History (abridged) |
| Single-needle knitting (naalbinding) is an extremely ancient textile technique with archeological finds of socks, mittens, and caps, employing various single-needle knitting stitches dating from 2000 BCE to the modern day. In addition, the samples have been located across the globe from the Tarim Basin (in western China) to the Andes mountains.
The oldest example (2000 BCE) identified to date was located in the Tarim Basin and employs the common buttonhole stitch. However, the most widely used stitch, with respect to time and geographical location, is a stitch referred to by Margrethe Hald as the "mesh" stitch. This stitch closely resembles modern knitting, and has been widely misidentified by the archaeological community as knitting. Given the historical practice of naming by the first archaeological location, I prefer to refer to it as the Tarim stitch. The Tarim stitch has been identified in finds located in the Tarim Basin, Roman settlements in Egypt, and various European ecclesiastical locations. In addition, the Tarim stitch has been depicted on Roman statues and knife handles in England (40 BCE to 400 AD), and on the Gundestrup Cauldron (100 BCE). Many other stitches evolved using these basic techniques to varying degrees of complexity. These other stitches are referred to variously as the Mammen stitch, the Asle stitch, the Oslo stitch, and so on. These stitches were developed principally by and continued to this day by the Scandinavian peoples...undoubtedly, this is a result of the inherent warmth of the denser and correspondingly more complex stitches. In truth, we owe a debt of gratitude to the Scandinavian folk who preserved the art form, which would surely have passed away with the development of modern knitting techniques. |
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| This Site |
| Many other websites address the topic of naalbinding. As such, I will not attempt to duplicate their efforts. However, those other sites focus on reconstruction of the Scandinavian articles and stitches, and do not address the Tarim stitch. In fact, the Tarim stitch cannot be described using most of the notational schemes developed for naalbinding.
In this site, I hope to fill this void with examples of articles as well as educational materials to reproduce those articles. The patterns that you will find are of my design, and I share them without let or hindrance. My hope is that this type of sharing will serve to re-establish the pre-eminence of the Tarim stitch. As I am not a professional developer of websites, you will undoubtedly find errors or broken links from time to time. Please contact me, if you find such problems at [email protected]. Remember, this site is organic and it will change on occasion...but I will try to maintain the overall structure as you now see it. |
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| Dedication |
| This site is dedicated to the people who have generously encouraged me over the years to excel and to exceed. |
| - To Meraud (Jolene), my wife, who has given me four beautiful children and has tolerated more hours of my tinkering than she can remember or I care to acknowledge.
- To Alix (Karen), who taught me (actually infected me with) this craft and constantly works to keep me focused on projects and their necessary completion. - To Xene (Vicki), who urges me along the path to peerage by providing a living example of what Peers should be...inside and outside the SCA. - To Gyrth (Gerry), who will ever be to me the very icon of a Knight, a Pelican and a Laurel. May his memory be eternal. - To my children and friends, who remind me every road is built one brick at a time. |
| Leather |
| Other |
| Cook |
| Brew |
| Links |
| Notes |
| Leather |
| Other |
| Cook |
| Brew |
| Links |
| Notes |
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