The (First?) Homemade Loom

So, I accidentally fall into a lot of my crafts. I'm a pretty scatterbrained person, and I think that's because there's about fifty tabs open at any time in my head. The eighth graders and I were talking about togas, which were made from twenty feet or so of hand woven fabric. I don't know if it's because of Snapchat and iPads and "kids these days" but they really didn't have a great grasp on weaving. (Then again, I probably have a better grasp on handicrafts than most people.) So, after seeing a painting of Penelope weaving while waiting for Odysseus to get home, the kids asked if we could learn to weave. (They also wanted to spin wool, but that's another blog post for another day.) ANYWAY, I remembered that we learned how to weave on cardboard in third grade, and so the week before break we worked on weaving tiny rectangles on pieces of cardboard. As a side note, you may think you are a kind and patient person, but if you try to teach 30 eighth graders to weave, you will learn that you are cruel, unsympathetic, and mean. However, the kids did seem to have fun.

I never actually got to finish this sample because... 8th graders.

(Best moment was when a student asked how Romans sewed all these tiny pieces together to make a toga... That led to a quick review on the difference between Roman looms and ours.)

So, this got me Pintering (Katius Rex) and after clicking through a few big looms I knew I would never make or buy (because lets be honest, weaving is a tiny bit limited compared to knitting or crocheting) I discovered the mini-loom "Weave-It," and became enamored of the little mid-century gem...

I'll make a different post about that later, because it deserves its own. To sum it up, it's a small 4x4 loom that makes little squares. What are you going to do with those little squares? A) I have no idea but they are very calming to make, and B) there's a great website, if you're interested in this tiny loom, that has all kinds of info and patterns:  Eloomanation

After making about ten / a million of these little squares, I started thinking that they could probably be used the way granny squares are -- bags, accessories, and of course ... AFGHANS. So, Christmas night after we got home from my brother's but we were still waiting for my husband to get home from work I showed my dad the Weave-It, and asked if he could cut me some wood to make a bigger one.

He asked what size and I said I needed the middle opening to be about twelve inches, because I figured I'd make twelve inch squares. This would make sizing blankets easy (five squares, five feet) and since it's a multiple of 4, I figured the pin arrangement would be easy. (That's the cool thing about the Weave-It -- that pin arrangement gives it a neat scalloped edge and makes warping it easier.) He cut a square out of one piece of plywood, so there were no joints at the corner to contend with. (Although probably not the best use of wood if you're trying to conserve?)

Dad goes into action.

So, and honestly I don't even remember how we got to this point, we didn't quite end up with a square foot. The interior square came out 10 and 1/8. To figure out where to place the pins, I measured a square a little over 11 inches around the edge, a little over 29 centimeters. Huh.

Hmmm.

So the crux of the matter was: what am I going to do about the correct spread of pins? If you are trying this on your own at home and DON'T care about having the Weave-It pattern of pins (the corners are a little strange, which is the real difficult part) you can just figure out your spacing (4 or 5 MM?) and divide the length of your pencil line (29 cm here) and there ya go. HOWEVER, I was enchanted by the scalloped edge that the Weave-It makes, so my method is as follows. Note: I don't know if this is actually logical but my loom makes really good squares so there you have it. Another note: I did do a crap load of sanding on that square that I forgot to mention. You don't want to weave on raw plywood you silly.

1. I counted up the number of Weave-It pins on each side, as well as SPACES. (I counted each space as 1.) 32 total.

2. The next problem I faced was I was pretty sure I couldn't just enlarge the scale of the Weave-It. 290 mm divided by 32 would be 9 mm, or almost a whole centimeter. Also yes, I switched to metric halfway through. Did I mention that?

3. So then I multiplied 32 by 2 to get 64. Fantastic. NOT! Nails ended up way too crowded.

4. Now this is the part that I'm not sure if it makes sense, but I got lucky. I multiplied that 32 by 1.5, and ended up with 48 So I divided 290 mm by 48 and got 6 mm.

5. So, starting with the number 1 corner on the Weave-It (Weave-It corners are numbered) I copied the pattern of pins all the way across, again, making sure to have the funky corners right. In between those corners, it's just a repeating pattern of groups of three. 6 mm between each nail, and 12 mm for the spaces between triads. I ended up with 11 groups of three in between each funky corner group. That's my cat helping me. I forget which one. We have two black cats because we're spooky. Also one of the cats is named Spooky. (The other one is Eerie. He's the worst/best you'll see him soon.)

Advanced envelope measuring technique.

6. Next I broke out the dremel. Well, my husband broke it out and we didn't have the right attachment but through the magic of blogging we can fast forward you through like three hours of getting dressed and walking around Home Depot and then I made a cactus planter BUT THEN I came back to this. Drill all the little holes. I think we used a 3/64 bit; I'll double check with Brett later. As a side note using the dremel is both fun and horrific and makes you feel like a dentist.

Action shot!

 7. Then you hammer a bunch of nails in! I got a big box of finishing nails at Home Depot because I wasn't sure how many I needed because at that point I hadn't counted up the holes yet and also idk giant box of nails now we have them forever I don't come into your home and judge your nails. My plywood square was 3/4 an inch thick and we got 1.5 inch nails. Our dremel guide didn't fit over the attachment to use the tiny bit so we just estimated how far into the wood we were going. Everything went fine, don't worry.

Giant box o nails.

And after a LOT of hammering... IT WAS DONE!

The squares off this slightly irregularly measured loom are about 10.5 inches. (Oh no back to imperial!) I used two strands of worsted weight. If you are one of those people who likes "measurements" and "takes pride in your work" you may want to be a little more exact than I was. Long story short: the finished square is beautiful, I can't wait to make blankets.