Chances are, you’ve never heard of nålbinding or a nålbinding Loopship and have no idea what any of this is. I only discovered it myself in early 2025, and quickly figured out that I like it a lot more than knitting or crochet. It’s an ancient fiber art involving lengths of thick wool yarn a few yards/meters long, a single wooden, bone, or horn needle, and your thumb.

The Nålbinding Loopship came about while I was first learning to solve a problem that still confuses me somewhat. I’d reached a stopping point in the first piece I worked on, then looked at my thumb with the piece hanging off of it and thought, “…now what?” I couldn’t come up with a quick and easy way to set my work-in-progress aside without risking losing the two working loops.

A few solutions already exist: a small stick, removable knitting/crochet stitch markers, or even the nålbinding needle itself. But I wanted something more fun, more secure, and less likely to snag on the fibers of the yarn. I also wanted to be able to more easily tell which loop was the front and which was the back.

In my experience, first prototypes are always a bit of a guessing game. Adding dimensions and features in CAD doesn’t always result in quite what I was expecting. With the Loopship, I actually got pretty close to what was in my head for the design, but I quickly discovered a few improvements I needed to make.

First things first, the tool was too big. I had trouble getting the stem and stern through the working loops because of how long the overall Loopship was. The sail was also gigantic relative to the rest of the ship, and didn’t need to be nearly that big to hold the loops apart.

The next issue I ran into was that the decorative curls on either end of the ship, intended to mimic the styling of an old longship, caught the fibers of the yarn and got snagged easily.

Still, for a proof of concept, I was very happy with how this prototype turned out.

For this version, I made the sail much smaller, got rid of the curls on the ends of the ship, and added a few mostly-decorative design elements. Circular shields lining the hull and broad stripes on the sail are two things that come to mind when thinking about Viking longships, so I added those into the 3D model.

This one was more what I wanted design-wise, but the prints themselves turned out a little bit rough. When printing very small objects, sometimes the backpressure inside the nozzle builds up too much and spurts out a little… think of a garden hose when you stick your thumb over the end of it.

Regardless, I really like how the striped sail and the shields help visually evoke a longship, especially with the stem and stern curls gone. I made some small adjustments, changed my printing settings, and got ready for Prototype #3.

Now that the points on either end of the ship were less likely to snag on the yarn fibers, it was easier to work with the tool. However, the points were still sharper than I wanted them to be, so I tried rounding them slightly. I didn’t get it quite rounded enough in this version, so I did more of it for Prototype #4.

I also lowered the shields to the top edge of the hull instead of sitting above it, so that they printed more smoothly and didn’t catch on the yarn. This gave the working surface a much cleaner finish, but now the bottoms of the shields were coming out rough since they didn’t have enough material below them to print cleanly.

I adjusted the edges of the shields again to try to smooth them out and make them easier to print, and also tweaked the shape of the hull to make it more rounded and smooth.

For this prototype, I switched to my high-detail printing nozzle, bringing the nozzle diameter from 0.4mm to 0.25mm. This allowed me to get cleaner details, eliminate several issues with the previous prototypes, and get closer to the finished product.

The points on the ends of the ship were also much better in this prototype after I spent some more time fine-tuning that part of the 3D model. Next, I tested it with the yarn I prefer to work with, and this version didn’t snag or catch at all.

I still had some issues with the bottom edges of the shields, though, so I went back to refine them again. I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I chose to make them a bit smaller.

For the finished product, I made the shields a bit smaller so that they were fully above the angled underside of the hull and printed much more cleanly. Now that they’re above that line, there’s no more issues with the bottoms getting rough.

I also added a small bit of reinforcement to the back of the mast to stabilize it. The print is very sturdy overall and someone would really need to wrench on the sail to snap it off, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

The last step was to add my business name and branding, as well as “Made in USA” to the back of the sail. Once all that was done and I had the print in my hand, I pulled out some work in progress and set up for product photos.