Tutorial: a new way to use the Martha Stewart Knit Loom
When I last talked about weaving on a square loom, I mentioned that the Martha Stewart Knit Looms are still available. Walmart, Amazon, Michaels, and Joann’s all carry them online, at least. I didn’t buy just one, I bought two.
The instructions for the Martha Stewart Knit Loom (MS loom) show how to use it to produce knitting as well as weaving. I’m going to ignore the knitting. The weaving instructions that come with the loom show how to use it like the older style pot holder looms. The pot holder looms require you to deal with the loops at the end of each row before it is finished. I’m going to ignore those instructions as well.
With two sets of the MS looms I had a lot of pieces to play with. I was familiar with the Weavette style loom where one warps the frame in three passes, then actually does the weaving on the fourth pass. Those looms use a long metal needle for the weaving. The MS loom only has a short plastic needle. It does have a long plastic hook that can be used, and that determined how large I felt comfortable making the MS loom.
Each kit comes includes four pieces with 12 holes (not counting the one in the male end). I used 8. I also used four corner pieces. The loom comes with four different colored pegs, and I used two of the colors, blue and pink.
Around half way through taking the photographs for this tutorial I discovered a better way of arranging the loom. Originally I put a peg in every hole. Some of those pegs weren’t needed to weave. So halfway through I went back and removed the pegs that I didn’t need. In the photos sometimes you will see a loom with empty holes, and sometimes you will see where I added circles to indicate holes.
The photo showing the actual assembled loom has two different diagrams. One shows how the pieces are attached together, the other just shows the pegs and holes. I decided to use pink pegs on the corners for no real reason. However, I used two pink pegs on the first corner to help orient myself where it belonged while weaving.
Now that we have set up the loom, I will show you the steps for weaving next week.
