Nalbinding with plant-dyed wool

This Saturday, we went to visit some friends who had a stall (and a real viking tent!) at a viking market, selling home-made nettle-cream, among other things. As we sat there on wooden stools outside their tent, drinking beer from drinking horns in the October sun, something caught my eye. Across the way, one of the stalls had many colors of yarn on display, so I went over to investigate. The yarn was plant-dyed, and the women who owned the stall were both doing nalbinding, or needlebinding, a technique which was used in the Viking age, before knitting and crochet. I've seen it a lot at Viking markets, and I had been wanting to try it for a while, so I bought four skeins of yarn and a wooden needle and was given a few words of advice, as well.

The red wool is dyed with madder, the pale green with birch leaves, the yellow with tansy and the purple with logwood.

When I got home, I found this great video by a nice Finnish woman explaining exactly how the technique works. This particular stitch is called the Mammen stitch, and was recommended to me by the women at the market for its strength and density. I've been trying it out, and this is what it's looking like so far, the first two rounds of a wristwarmer:

The wonder of wool

Around the time that my mother made her first bedspread, something new and very exciting was on the market: machine yarn! It was thin, could be bought in large quantities and came in all colors. But best of all, it was 100% acrylic, which meant that it could be machine-washed!

The funny thing is, for as long as I can remember, my mother and grandmother have been ardent fans of pure wool and have always wrinkled their noses at acrylic clothing. I've inherited this view of things, and for years, I've been checking the labels inside clothes in shops before even considering trying them on. As a baby, my mother put me in cotton cloth-diapers and knitted little woollen pants washed in lanolin to wear over them. In short: we don't wear 'unnatural' fabrics in this family! ...mostly.

So I was very disappointed when my mother told me that they had all completely sold out in the 1960s! Of course, it made my grandmother's life quite a bit easier, being able to machine-wash the sweaters of her three girls. After a while, though, she went back to using wool because it was warmer and regulated temperature better.

I love wool, not only because it's so comfortable, but also because to me, it represents something natural and good. It would seem strange to simply ignore the fantastic materials that nature provides. I haven't gone so far as to only wear earth colors, but I love the not-quite-smooth-and-streamlined yarn types. I've been made aware of an exciting "new" form of knitting, dogma knitting, where the wool isn't spun, but you knit directly from a complete sheared 'fur' of a sheep. This gives a really interesting structure and I would love to try it out sometime. Have alook at the technique here, or if any of you have any experience with dogma knitting, I would love to hear about it!