About Using Frame Looms

Series Summary

A loom is a machine used for weaving thread or yarn into textiles. Looms can range from small hand-held frames, to large free-standing hand looms, to enormous automatic mechanical devices. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads. The exact shapes of the loom and its mechanics may vary, but the basic function is the same. Frame looms are constructed out of sticks and boards attached at right angles, which means that it is portable and can even be held in the weaver's lap. Frame looms are still in use today, usually as a portable, less expensive, and compact alternatives to a table or floor loom.

So, how do you use a frame loom? What materials do you need and what techniques are employed to weave with one. In this free video series, you'll find the answers to all of these questions and more! From making a frame loom to ripping rags for weaving, tightening the warp, and weaving techniques, these videos have it all. You'll also learn how to fix weaving mistakes, weave a pattern into a rug, and weave more than one thread at a time for specific details. The concept may sound daunting, but with these video instructions, weaving with a frame loom is much easier than it looks!

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Debby Derobatere, and I'm here today, with Expert Village, to show you how to make a rag rug on a frame loom. This is something that's extremely obtainable and you can do it anywhere, with any material at all. I am a professional sculptor, but I am also an archaeologist for the Mississippi and Culture Organization out of St. Louis. We're an American Indian non-profit and we preserve and restore traditional knowledge. In the Dine culture, the Navajo people weave on small frames, out in the country. And this is a really old weaving, that was specifically to put over a window or a door. This is clouds reflected in a lake. And then, this one's a really new one, where the guys are weaving, and it actually shows somebody's truck at their house. This is a Hogan and the more she could have, the richer you are. So, it's between the four corners. And the wind's blowing, and here's the mountains behind them and they have trees and it's real interesting. So they've gone from being kind of really abstract to showing kind of what's going on. You can make whatever you want and I certainly do. But it's really a fun activity. Now, I just want you to know a little bit about what you're going to need to do this project. You'll want to make a frame or get a frame that's fairly sturdy, so it'll hold your loom. This is called the loom once you start stringing it up. Then you need a couple of dowels that are pretty sturdy, some really heavy thread or yarn, and then it's really good to start with jute, because it's pretty forgiving material, and it's thick enough that you can really get a feel for it. And then you want to have some stuff to tear up. It's really good to have woven fabric that you can rip, otherwise you'll have to cut it. But you want strips that are about this thick. So, you can get really colorful and think of what you want to do and we're going to sit down and I'm going to show you how to do the weaving part of the frame now."