Nalbind Like a Viking

In case you hadn't already thought about this, if you would prefer to make a headband instead of a hat,  just follow the hat directions but stop when it is the width you desire and BEFORE you get to the shaping for the crown. As you can see from the photos below, you can the headband wide enough that they can double as a cowl, or just wide enough to cover your ears and forehead to keep you warm without getting "hat hair"! I did the narrower white one with the looser of the two Oslo stitch variations and the wider frosted periwinkle one with the denser version. I am trying to practice some decorative stitching - I am soooo awful at it and it is so frustratingly slow!   But I have as a goal to get better this year both because I ultimately want to be able to add interesting line and motion thru stitching to my felt and also I want to decoratively stitch my nalbound mittens in the fashion of the Norwegian mittens. I'm a long way from either of those goals, but betwee...

I put this beginning tutorial together to help anyone who might be interested in learning to nalbind.  Nalbinding doesn't replace knitting for me, but I enjoy the process a lot and it gives me a chance to channel my Viking past (I figure any of us with ancestry in the British Isles must have some somewhere in our lineage!). Kidding aside, I have enjoyed my trips to Iceland, Norway, Ireland, Sweden and Gotland immensely and so engaging in this ancient craft of the Vikings has a lot to do with the process bringing back great memories of those trips with my sisters. There are a lot of videos on this ancient craft online - that's how I learned, combined with a LOT of trial and error and a DVD that a sister purchased for me! Because some of the videos were terrible and others were good at what they covered, but they left important things out, I ended up watching an awful lot of videos and had to piece it together. So I thought I would compile what I learned in one place. And n...