Weave it to me

Karrie from Girl on the Rocks is starting a week of weaving information about looms, patterns, and more. Check out her blog for great ideas about palm-sized looms and weaving projects.

For young children, you can't go wrong with a classic plastic pot-holder loom and a bag of nylon loops. This is the type we use with kids age 3 and up in the classroom and art studio.

The loom pictured up above was a heddle loom we used in the classroom. It is useful for weaving belts, skinny scarves, bracelets, bookmarks, and headbands. You can make your own heddle with popsicle sticks; maybe we'll show you how in another post.

For large weaving projects, or shared projects on which several children can work together, you can purchase large classroom looms for about $215. Or you can do what we did -- find a big, cheap wooden picture frame (thrift store, garage sale, junk shop, or clearance), drill holes along the top and bottom, and insert pieces of dowel rod you cut yourself. Total cost: approximately $4.00. We added a couple of pieces of wood at the bottom to serve as feet, strung it up, and we were good to go.

Of course, I have just looked through 500 pictures of the kids in the art studio and can't find a good picture of our loom in action. I will ask Leisa if she has one and post asap!

Read about it elsewhere:

Purl Bee: The Lure of the Loom

eloomination

eloominator blog

For a nice selection of plastic and wood looms, check out Dick Blick. Be careful: art supplies are just as enticing online as they are in person.

This is a picture of hands sewing, not weaving. I'll ask Leisa if she can find a picture of our homemade loom!

Enclosure

Comments

[leslie]

oh i love the sewing. we are working on sewing with my bluebirds. they struggled so hard with the first 5 mins that just like that were off and running. amazing. we have another lesson coming up next monday. i totally love the weaving too, oh more pictures please!

:)

[Lori]

leslie - yes, i think it's always worth trying these things, even if they don't work out - they might later! and if everyone has a relaxed attitude about it, at least we laugh. ;^) glad your experiment went well!

we built a really inexpensive, really big loom that all the kids could work on together over time - we just bought a huge cheap wooden frame at a discount store, then drilled holes along two opposite sides and set inch-long dowels (about 1/16th of an inch diameter) into the holes with wood glue. strung it up & the kids wove everything in there - not just yarn or string, but feathers, everything! fun project. :^)