Nalbinding Project: First Attempts

So, I too went to the Beehive wool shop. I purchased tapestry needles as well as single pile wool. To my surprise, the worker at the shop knew what I was talking about when I mentioned nalbinding, although she said she didn’t do it herself, and was able to give me some good advice on what to buy supply-wise.

My starting materials: A tapestry needle and non-plied yarn

My first attempt at nalbinding was not what one would call a ‘success’. In fact, after a lot of yarn breakage, stitch dropping, and restarting, I formed a very solid mass of knots.

I found one of the biggest struggles in beginning to be the starting stitches. It seemed as if there were a lot of different methods that people use to start off their projects, so I had to find one that worked for me. I couldn’t find an official name, so this ended up being what I call the ‘make a pretzel and stick it on your thumb’ method. It ended up working pretty well for me, although it took a while before I didn’t have to look at my resource video while I did it. The video I found myself referring to the most is linked below:

Another struggle I faced was my left-handedness since the tutorials I found were all right handed. I thought it would be easy enough to switch to the other side, but I ended up getting a lot more confused with what direction the yarn should be overlapping and going in then I’d thought I would. So, I drew out a lefty diagram for myself and with a little practice I got this down as well. Next, it was time to actually start stitching. I decided to go with the Oslo stitch since it seemed to be both the most prominent in tutorials and the simplest. The first strand I produced was full of gaps, twisted, and had unevenly sized stitches. As illustrated below, it wasn’t pretty, and my second try wasn't much better.

My first two attempts: quite twisted, with uneven stitching

However, as I kept nalbinding, I found it easier to get more uniform segments. From looking at tips on various sites, I learned that keeping the tension and placement of the yarn on your thumb constant is the key to this. I found that as I progressed, the strands started looking better, and I didn’t have to pay as much attention to every little thing I was doing.


Left: First attempt at joining into circle, uneven, twisted stitches, Right: Later attempt, more uniform and 'clean' looking.

Once I felt like I had this down, I thought I’d give nalbinding in the round a try. Once again I ended up getting mixed up. My first attempt didn’t seem to be going well, and was beyond fixing, so I decided to re-try. After a lot of practice, it seemed to be going pretty well. I thought I had completed a second joined row, when I noticed that somehow, someway, I had joined up two opposite sides and turned the project into a figure eight.