Nalbinding has officially become popular enough that AI is now being used to create nalbinding craft books for sale that will likely trick beginners looking for a cheap entry level instruction books. Unfortunately, the results of using AI to write a nalbinding book currently read like a badly mangled plagiarized scraping of internet blog posts combined into sections that don’t have any logical flow. Not only do the instructions not have the insights from an established nalbinding instructor that are necessary to enhance learning, they actively are wrong and do not make any sense. Add to that, their history sections and stitch name to classification cross walks are all mixed up.
The pictures on the front covers are clearly AI generated. The picture on the left looks more like a bad interpretation of crochet. The picture on the right is not a recognizable stitch and has a very odd thumb. Unfortunately, it is not possible to learn nalbinding with the help of these books.
For a craft where there is already both insufficient and diffusely produced research, no consolidated corpus of historical artifacts (I’m working on both of these1), and limited modern craft instructions available,2 these AI produced books do nothing to contribute to the craft. In fact, they are likely to convince people to not even continue to try learning what is a beautiful and widely diverse craft.
Do not waste your money on AI written nalbinding books. If you’d like to learn to nalbind, there are several venues suitable to multiple different learning styles. If you like videos, there are a lot on YouTube. My videos can be found here: Nalbinding by Anne Marie Decker, but Sanna-Mari’s cover a wide variety of stitches: https://www.en.neulakintaat.fi/. If you prefer static diagrams or pictures, there are several instruction books currently on the market produced by real live people that have experience teaching nalbinding. Besides my own instruction manuals mentioned in the footnotes below, some of my favorites are: Maria Lind Heel’s out of Denmark (available at https://www.etsy.com/shop/HistoricalcraftsDK) and Kaupeyrir’s out of the UK (https://www.etsy.com/shop/Kaupeyrir). What are your favorites?
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My thanks to Ingela Andersson Lindberg for bringing these to my attention.
Edit (8/13/25): And three more, just in the last few days. One only has 3 pages. None of the cover art is even remotely nalbinding.
- The insights available in a properly organized database are fascinating and clear even from the initial efforts. What is also clear is that we need a proper protocol for examining and reporting on the characteristics of nalbound fabrics as much of the published research is lacking details that facilitate any broader analysis. ↩︎
- I’ve written two nalbinding instruction manuals, Nalbinding Made Easy and The Åsle Mitten Stitch, which are currently available for sale here in PDF format: https://tanglefairies.etsy.com ↩︎