Pardon the long absence. I´ve been travelling and working like a maniac, and when I've had free time I've simply been way too lazy to blog. I appear to consider blogging to be more akin to work than play. I need to adjust my attitude regarding this whole issue.
Anyways, I was in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago to visit the boyfriend. It rained the whole time, so I didn't really do alot of touristy stuff, but then, I really didn't need to since I used to live in Cambridge and had seen it all before. The real purpose of my trip, though, was to give him the secret socks (not so secret anymore!) for his birthday (I gave him some other stuff too, I'm not a total scrooge). To make a long story short, he liked them and that made me happy. Good.
Now I'm back in Iceland and working hard on my thesis which is due in two months. I've kindof finished the sausage arms cardigan, although blocking remains, and I've started yet another cardigan that is going along swimmingly. Photobooth will, in good time, bring pictures of all these wonders, but what I wanted to talk about today was this:
This weekend I attended the annual Viking Festival in Hafnarfjörður. I try to go every year, mostly because I think vikings are cool, and entertaining to boot. I'm also a little obsessed with my nordic heritage and want to keep it alive through educating myself about the ways of my ancestors. So, there I was enjoying the usual viking festivities (drinking mead, fighting with swords and axes, grilling whole sheep over an open fire) when I noticed that all the viking ladies were engaged in some kind of wooly craft. I asked one of them what they were doing, and it turns our they were nalbinding. I'd read about this technique before, and seen pictures of garments made with it, but never had I seen it in action. The lady viking was nice enough to show me the basics of the technique and sell me a needle to do it with. I want to try to find some more permanent instructions somewhere, though, because I'm not sure I remember correctly how she did it.
Nalbinding strikes me as more related to crochet than knitting. The only downside I can see to nalbinding is that you can only work with short lengths of yarn at a time, which means lots of ends to weave in. But I really liked the garments that I saw at the festival, they had a kind of freestyle look to them, not as structured and orderly as knitted garments.
Man, the world is just full of interesting stuff I want to learn, when will I have the time?
4 comments:
try here
http://www.thebellwether.com/nalbinding.html
looks interesting
Nalbinding is TOO cool! How exciting that you learned how to do it! :-)
There's also a little bit about it here:
http://www.stringpage.com/naal/naal.html
There is a blogger I read who does a lot of Viking crafts and nålbinding, she had some links to videos here: http://heleneh.sprayblogg.no/m_082006.html
Eiginmaðurinn minn kemur frá Hafnarfirði.
You can splice the ends together (bleyta og nudda saman), especially easy if you are working with Icelandic wool and no more ends to worry about.
Post a Comment