Is Viking Wire Weaving a Wire Crafted Version of Nalebinding?

The short answer here is somewhere between maybe and probably.  It's entirely reasonable if your reaction to that is, "What in heck is nalebinding?"  Bear with me if you're confused.  Nalebinding is a historic textile craft that can mimic the appearance of knitting.


This is a pair of Coptic era Egyptian socks produced by nalebinding:
(credit: David Jackson CC-sa 2.0)

These socks are part of the collection in the British Museum; a high resolution photograph is available here.  These socks look very similar to the plaited stitch in knitting, which is discussed in an earlier post.

The Coptic Stitch in nalebinding produces the same pattern as the plaited stitch but accomplishes it by a different technique: instead of holding all the stitches on a long needle and working a new row onto the open loops from a continuous length of yarn, nalebinding uses a sewing needle to work each new stitch onto the bottom of the previous row with a short piece of yarn.  A video that shows the technique is available here.

If diagrams illustrate it better, try this example from Siglindesarts's Blog.  The Coptic stitch at right (also known to nalebinders as the tarim stitch) is structurally identical to basic wire weaving,  The difference is each new stitch is worked onto the "crossed" part of the previous stitch.  So the crafter only needs to control one stitch at a time; once an ongoing work has a stable beginning it does not unravel.
(Credit: Diane Harper)

Nalebinding cannot be worked in a continuous thread so its practitioners use wool and join lengths of yarn by felting the ends together.  Modern wire weaving also requires joins, which practitioners conceal by working the ends into the center of a cylindrical piece.

Here's one of my own wire weaving projects still on the mandrel with a join visible at right: a vertical wire stretches down about eight rows.  Essentially this is Coptic Stitch nalebinding that substitutes wire as its medium.  Every modern crafter I know adds wire stitches from the bottom, "nalebinding style" so to speak.

That would seem to settle the matter right?

I wish it were that straightforward.  For several centuries this was a lost art.  Modern practitioners have revived it through reverse engineering; as these two posts have demonstrated there are different crafting techniques that could theoretically produce the same effect.  So we know how people make this today, but are modern wire crafters just copying each other with a modern method?

Is Wire Weaving a Knit Stitch?

Over at another blog there's an analysis of a wire craft known variously as Viking wire weaving, Viking wire knitting, and Trichinopoly.  This esoteric hobby is the subject of ongoing debates among its practitioners about how historic examples of this craft were constructed and which name is appropriate (or least inappropriate).

As someone who teaches this craft at SCA events I've spotted technical problems with the available analysis.  A very patient friend has watched me clog her Facebook posts with comments when she shares links on the subject so it's probably time to blog.  This will be a long post.

First question: is this craft a knit?

For simplicity this post refers to Viking wire weaving even though this is not a weave and the craft is not specific to the Vikings.  All of the existing names for the craft are contested.

The other blog contrasted two diagrams to conclude that Viking wire weaving is structurally distinct from knitting.

Here's a diagram for regular knitting:
(credit: Bastianowa, CC-by-sa 2.5)

Here's a diagram for Viking wire weaving:
(credit: Eirny)

In the opinion of some wire weaving crafters this sets wire weaving apart from knitting on a structural level.

Actually what those two diagrams do is contrast a wire weaving stitch against the stockinette stitch.  Knitting has a great variety of stitches, another of which is known as the plaited stitch or plaited stockinette stitch.

Here's a photograph of a plaited stitch:
(Credit: WillowW, CC-by 3.0)

The plaited stitch is not a common stitch in knitting because the fabric it produces is less pliant than stockinette, but the plaited stitch is very easy to replicate--beginning knitters make it accidentally by picking up a stitch from the wrong side of the needle when they try to create the stockinette stitch.  A knitting guide by Mary Thomas explains the plaited stitch in detail.

So no, wire weaving is not distinguishable from knitting on the basis of stitch structure.  A more complicated argument could be put forth about advanced stitches but the conclusion would be the same: it is possible to generate the equivalent of a double stitch or a triple stitch in knitting, and although that might require advanced skills on needles it is relatively easy to accomplish on a knitting spool: just wrap the fiber one or two extra times before completing a stitch.

The difference is not of structure but of technique: knitting adds new stitches to the top of existing stitches, which allows for long stretches of continuous fiber but makes an item prone to unravel; wire weaving (at least in its modern practice) uses a construction technique akin to nalebinding in that it adds new stitches to the bottom of existing stitches, which avoids the problem of unraveling but requires that every stitch be completely pulled through.  The next post will examine nalebinding in greater detail.