SEEKING THE MARKS OF KNITTING WITHIN THE HISTORY: NALBINDING

Being a textile surface formation method basing on binding and passing the loops prepared separately with an assistant such as crochet needle, knitting needle or shuttle and coming from the ball through one another, weft knitted fabric’s development process within the history has mostly been associated with hand-knit started with knitting needles. Together with this, scientific examinations and dating methods conducted on the needles and breadths brought out in the archaeological digs carried out world-wide proves that the commencement of hand-knit within the history dates back older times. The findings came up in archaeological digs show that knitting began with world-widely known nalbinding technique or single needle knitting. Nalbinding is based on binding the loops formed with needle and thread to one another in the form of a cyclic hoop within themselves. Although nalbinding is expressed in several Turkish resources related to knitting, it is an old technique that is not commonly used. This technique used in Northern Europe shows similarity with shuttled knitting, fishnet knitting, point lace techniques commonly known in Anatolia and in terms of formation of surface with thread hoop and usage of single thread carrier. Even though nalbinding technique is not common in Anatolia, the fact that some needles thought to have been used as knitting needle were found in the recent archaeological digs (Başur Höyük–Siirt, Körtik Tepe-Diyarbakır) makes us consider that the history of knitting dates back to 11.000 BC in these lands and knitting technique made by using knitting needle might have been used in Anatolia. Besides this, there is not an assessment on whether nalbinding was used in Turkey or not. It is observed that there is an increasing interest in nalbinding technique, which is used for gloves, socks and knit cap around the world since 1970s. Revival of this technique in Scandinavian countries is in question. For that reason, this research was designed for the ones showing interest to textile design techniques as a collection to introduce the history and technique of nalbinding technique, and its needles over knitting needles found out in recent archaeological digs conducted in Turkey and around the world. Keywords: Knitting, nalbinding, single needle knitting, knitting in archaeological digs, knitting textile findings