Step-by-step How to make a simple loom!

Today we covered design and technology, textiles and history with this little project. 

 

I was inspired by a loom that my Naomi had been given for her birthday by a dear friend of ours and the fact that we had been reading Homer's The Illiad and got to the point where it spoke of a loom and so I went to raid our craft drawers and made...

...Our very own loom!

Which created a very simple and small scarf this time but was quite effective I think.  If you want to try it yourself I have written a step by step tutorial here to make your own loom...

You will need:

• An A4 piece of stiff card
• A hole punch
• Straws -  we used 7
• A pencil
• Wool
• An extra piece of stiff card 20cm long and 5cm thick

STEP ONE

Fold your A4 piece of card in half.

STEP TWO

Punch at least 7 holes through the open side of your folded A4 piece of card.  You should have something that looks like this...

STEP THREE

Push your straws through the holes so the straws go through the card like this...  You want it to be a tight fit but we needed to make our holes a tiny bit bigger so we did this using a sharp pencil.

STEP FOUR

Cut seven 1 metre lengths of wool (or as many lengths of wool as you have straws).

STEP FIVE

Open the card a little and tie each of the metre long pieces of wool round each of the straws in between the gap, so it looks like this...

STEP SIX

 

Get your smaller strip of cardboard and put as many holes as you have straws in it with the same amount of gap that you gave your straws.  Make the holes very small, just big enough to push through your wool like in the bottom right hand corner of the photo below...

 

 

STEP SEVEN

Cut a metre length bit of wool, any colour you fancy and tie it to the first straw on the left, like in the photo above.

 

STEP EIGHT

Cut a bit of cardboard into a circular shape and then, carefully making a hole in the middle with a pencil, cut a bigger hole in it, this will be your shuttle.  (we used some of an old cereal box for our shuttle)

STEP NINE

Tie the other end of the piece of string you have just knotted onto your loom to the shuttle and then begin to weave in and out the loom threads like this...

WHEN YOU HAVE FINISHED

To finish off you tie the ends up two or three at a time.  Pull the straw out to free the end you can see in the picture above.  

 

This is what my daughter's very first attempt looked like, she got to hang of it towards the end and most importantly had fun trying.