Early in the project it became clear to us that our biggest with the materials would be acquiring enough naalbinding needles for all four of us. With that in mind, a few of our group members wanted to try their hand at making a needle and the pictures shown in this section were the ones made primarily by Sam and ultimately finished by Hazel. The process itself was relatively straightforward though time consuming. The blanks in the first image were formed from a larger piece of softwood by using a table saw and a power drill. Of the seven blanks formed, five of them were formed into proper needles while the remaining two ended up splitting along the grain of the wood. The refining process involved the use of a needle file, a knife, and a rotary sander to remove the excess material efficiently.
One drawback to having gone with a softer wood ended up being that the needles are more prone to splintering, an issue that became quite prevalent once we began to actually use them. As a result, Hazel volunteered to attempt to fix the problem by further sanding them on a grindstone and polishing them with beeswax. Thankfully, these additional efforts made them quite nice to use and alleviated the prior issues.
If we were to make more in the future, the biggest change made would be to the type of wood used. A harder wood would be less likely to splinter even though it would take longer to form the needles from the blanks.
Before we were able to craft our own needles, we were loaned one bone and one wood naalbinding needle by our professor, Dr. Erin Halstad McGuire. These two were used primarily during the initial learning process and later used more by Juliette. Our group also ended up purchasing another two beautiful needles from a shop called Knit This Purl That Canada.
