Table-Top Loom Experimenting

The scarf is about 7.5 inches wide.

A friend gave me a table-top loom she found while moving. I had never used a table-top loom before, but it's basically the same as any other loom I've used. There were a couple of pieces missing that I had to replace to make it functional, as I expect with most used looms. Once I had it all fixed up, I decided I might as well put something simple on it to try to weave just for experimenting's sake.

The compact portability of the loom is definitely an asset. You only need about a little more than a square foot, a lot less than my floor loom. But, the max width of a piece for this loom is only 9-10 inches. This makes it perfect for scarfs or thin table runners. And hey, you can always sew pieces together.

This loom only had two harnesses, which means that only a simple plain weave (or tuskaft as they call it in Swedish) can be accomplished. Here the warp threads are alternating blue and brown, and the weft is blue. When the pattern is a plain weave, it means that (in this case) the blue weft goes over all the blue warp threads and under all the brown warp threads when one harness is up, and the reverse when the other harness is up.

With this loom I could also do a basket weave, in which case the weft goes over two threads and then under two threads. The more harness a loom has, the more complex the pattern can be. My floor loom has four harnesses.