Tag: Tips

Warning: AI created Nalbinding Books

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.

Do not waste your money. These two books appear to be entirely AI generated. They contain random text about nalbinding that clearly has been scraped from internet and put together into erroneous claims. One is completely without pictures and the other only has two pictures. The text is illogical and grammatically messy. Measurements alternate between cm and inches without any logical reason.
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.

  1. 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. ↩︎
  2. 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 ↩︎

Tips: Shaping by eye

Maintaining a flat spiral in nalbinding can be challenging. There are limited instructional resources compared to knitting and crochet. Nalbinders often use instinctive strategies for increasing or decreasing stitches, considering loop angles. Proper alignment helps avoid ruffles.

Maintaining a flat spiral in nalbinding is something that people often find tricky in the beginning. Other looping techniques, such as knitting and crochet, have had many instructions published on the number of stitches to add in each round in order to build a flat circle at a variety of gauges. Nalbinding does not have that wealth of instructional history yet.

Many nalbinders rely on more instinctive increasing strategies, given the lack of pre-tested and published instructions. There are numeric strategies that one can use to help you determine the number of stitches, but they are affected by grist of yarn,1 stitch choice, and gauge used. While it can be a helpful guide, translating from the instructions for its looped cousins can also present challenges as they are often written for rounds, not spirals.

I tend to fall in the instinctive category of nalbinders. If it needs to get bigger, add more stitches. Needs to be smaller, decrease. But it’s not entirely just intuitive. I do pay conscious attention to the angles of my working loops in relation to the growing textile and that informs my decisions.

Specifically, I compare the angle at which my thumb loop intersects the line from the center of the textile through my connection point (where I take the next connection stitch).

When the thumb loop leans away from the center line, it needs an increase to keep the spiral fabric flat. When it is parallel to or just leaning away slightly, no increase is needed. Just take a regular stitch. If the thump loop crosses the center line, you have too many increases and likely need a decrease or two to avoid ruffling your fabric. It’s best to always stay just not quite parallel and never cross the line unless a ruffled fabric is what you are aiming for.

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  1. A nice explanation of Yarn grist and the effects when substituting yarns: https://www.moderndailyknitting.com/2018/07/25/grist-secret-measurement-substituting-yarn/ ↩︎

International Nalbinding in Public Day – Sept 1st

My original plans to participate in the International Nalbinding in Public Day* this year were waylaid by Hurricane Ida working its way North. As a substitute, I recorded the first in a series of tips videos that I have planned.

In this video I show the simple start I use for nalbinding. I use the base row for Mammen (and Korgen, Müsen etc.) as an example, but it can be used as the base start for a number of variants. I show how to tell which loops are which, how to hold the loops while forming a new stitch, and what movements keep the nalbinding loops in position.

I hope you find it helpful and that today finds you happy, healthy, and warm.

* Today was the sixth annual World Wide International Nalbinding in Public Day