A niddy noddy is a tool used in textile production. It can have different purposes, like storing the yarn in a practical manner or making it easier to dye. There are two Scandinavian places with Viking Age finds of niddy noddies: Oseberg/Norway and Hedeby/Germany (Viking Age: Denmark).

The raw wool contains everything left in there when the sheep is shorn. Including insects, flora and things from the stable floor.

In the times before industrial spinning mills, even before the first spinning wheels, wool and flax had to be spun with the drop spindle. Because the production of textile threads was an elemental part of the production of clothes, spinning can be seen as very important in the everyday life of the people.

After a yarn is spun, one wants to remove it from the drop spindle to make room for a new one or to work with it. One possibility to do so is by winding it into a ball; however, there is still a lot of tension in the yarn so that it'll have to rest quite a long time before it can be used without entangling it in itself. Another possibility is to wind it on a niddy noddy. Whether the Viking Age people used this tool or not is not to the question, since there are archaeological finds from Oseberg/Norway and Hedeby/Denmark (now Germany).

It was a very sunny weekend and just as sunny shone the yellow tones we managed to dye onto round about 8kg of wool cloth and yarn. All expectations were exceeded by the greens produced the next day when dyeing some of the material again using Indigo...

Wood might be the oldest working material used by humankind. Even before people began to make stone tools, they would have used branches, clubs and twigs in order to make everyday life easier, be it for hunting or for making camp. And so we can assume that in the Viking Age, too, wood appeared as the most common working material for all sorts of every day objects, even though be historically speak of the "Iron Age" (for Northern Europe), which rather reflects the "material most difficult to produce for everyday use", however[citation needed].

Our camp consists of a self-sewn woollen (4.5mx5m) A-tent, a presentation table, a smaller kitchen table, some chests, a small bench, some baskets full of raw wool, and Víl's shaving horse a.k.a. his universal woodworking contraption.

Helen Clarke, Kristina Lamm

Zentrum für Baltische und Skandinavische Archäologie, 2017

It was by far our coldest market weekend so far but everyones spirits were high and as a season opener this one surpassed every other market.